The Wellness Industry

Is the Wellness Industry selling you snake oil?

The opening line is good about white women inventing yoga in the 90s. Yes, us White people invented EVERYTHING, including American democracy. (For lazy mfkrs who can't be arsed to click: we STOLE it from the Haudenosaunee.)

I have used the term wellness at times and I desperately want to stop blogging about health topics and other topics that have a long history of getting me mistreated in online forums and doing little to pay my bills.

I don't have ads on my sites in part because I do write about wellness and I don't want colloidal silver advertised on my sites because I don't even know how to treat silver poisoning, so if someone reading my health writing saw an ad for it on one of my sites and thought that meant I approve, I can't even tell them how to undo the damage.

I also have a site critiquing astrology and I end up feeling about wellness like I feel about astrology: We took a wrong turn somewhere and threw the baby out and kept the bathwater.

I'm a few classes short of a Bachelor of Science. In spite of being the WRONG gender to get a shred of respect, I spent a lot of years on Hacker News where discussion was pretty rigorous -- at least until the pandemic ruined ALL discussion forums EVERYWHERE because people hunkered down, stayed home and joined forums en masse like a GLOBAL September flood from which no forum has EVER recovered or ever will.

For the great unwashed masses who have no idea what that means: "eternal September" refers to the Internet history where online discussion groups would get an influx of new members every September due to the start of college and it would take a bit to inculcate them with online forum culture. Then the Internet got popular and the influx of new users was constant and substantial and it had a terrible impact on previously respected discussion groups.

Anyway, I am well aware people tend to take multivitamins as a lazy solution to cover everything so they don't need to eat healthy or understand nutrition and multivitamins frequently have poorly bioavailable chemical forms and ingredients that shouldn't be taken together.

I'm well aware a lot of for-profit wellness products are vastly worse than the for-profit medical industry in the US because it's equally motivated by greed and even less regulated.

Sadly, I agree with a lot of the criticisms of the wellness industry in videos like the one above and I'm exhausted and don't really feel like trying to explain why and how my writing is not really like THAT.

I have been trying to explain a more rigorous, more scientific approach to things frequently found under the icky wellness industry colloidal silver poison yourself for their profit pile of manure.

It gets me no respect, nothing but enormous disrespect and contempt and hostility, and doesn't pay my bills and I don't really want to continue this battle.

I desperately desperately desperately want a magic door out of my shit life and into something better because trying to improve the health and welfare of other people has so far gotten me 99 percent a kick in the teeth.

So with any luck, I will figure out how to stop updating my various health sites at some point and invest my time and energy into something that actually pays my bills.

And all y'all are free to dismiss me as one of those MORONS who believes in astrology and also that ridiculous wellness nonsense and only IMAGINED I was deathly ill at one time and got better via placebo effect.