Mend Together
Can we find another way?
This is part of August’s theme of zenith. You can read more about the theme here, and last week’s essay here.
Also yes, I have changed the title of this essay multiple times. Hopefully now I’ll settle on this one.
Recently, two unrelated people have asked me if I’m a healer. Or—in less woo terms—a health/wellness practitioner in the alternative medicine space. The one person sort of just assumed it. When I was checking in at an event for alt health, they asked: “You are a healer too…?” And I had to tell them no, I’m not. “Not yet,” they replied, with a suggested wink if not a real one.
Maybe that’s in the cards for me. I don’t know. I think about it on and off and I have taken some steps towards various trainings. But if that’s what I’m meant to be, my modality is not clear. I studied herbalism for a bit. Craniosacral has brought me much healing, so I’ve considered that. When I started acupuncture I thought that might be when I ought to train in and then I realized the amount of waste (plastic packaging for the needles) I’d create in the process. That turned into an immediate no. I feel working in the fertility awareness method is healer work, and I’ve come quite close to formal training in that department. Still, I’ve so far held back.1
Nothing at present seems like it’s “the thing,” and I am one of those people who thinks I’ll know the right thing when I see it. So I keep looking and wondering. And as I’ve started to do that I’ve noticed the incredible amount of content and the incredible number of people working in the sphere of wellness, healing, and “alternative” health. Lots of opinions, lots of websites, lots of Instagram accounts, lots of products, lots of choices.
Personally, I find it a bit dizzying.
One day I was scrolling through a list of practitioners in the area of women’s health, birth, postpartum—that sort of thing. I was scrolling scrolling scrolling. There was one after the next, often with profile pictures of serene-looking women or a logo featuring plants. Their pictures, websites and pages started to blend together.
And that is not to knock what any of them are doing. There were so many that I wasn’t able to dive deep into every single one.
But I found myself wondering: with so many people working in this space of healing and finding non-conventional avenues to health, why are there still so many people hurting? What’s a person who’s hurting to do? And what’s the right choice for a person who wants to help in the healing?
If this is not peak “wellness” I’m a bit afraid to see what is.
There is so much content—so many products, podcasts, programs, containers, sessions, groups and more. The wellness industry is, after all, estimated at some variously high values, all different depending on who you talk to. But all of those numbers are in the trillions. Trillions. And ever increasing, of course. That’s what capitalism does best. In this economy, that makes all things wellness ripe for potentially making a living or making a mess.
Midwife Leah Hazard, in her book Womb2, details two sides of the wellness industry, specifically when it comes to “womb wellness.” But I think her analysis bares out for all categories of wellness. “Purveyors of womb wellness,” she says, “tend to fall into one of two camps:
“…on the one side, the earthy, grassroots inheritors of Jeannine Parvati’s legacy—often solo practitioners of complementary therapies or purveyors of small-batch herbs, pessaries and potions—and on the other, manicured gurus with megawatt smiles and sophisticated websites selling big ticket ‘merch’ and expansive membership to online communities.”
At a value of several trillion, surely wellness is a wee bloated? The conventional model is of course not much better. I think the reason folks—particularly women—are struggling through chronic and ill health so much is partly the fault of the Western medical model.3 But I wonder: is the “alternative” health industry really the only alternative? Is it, as a whole, really actually helping?
It worries me how easy it is to hang out your virtual shingle now. Leah Hazard writes about the two camps of wellness—earthy v Goopy—but she doesn’t really get into the issue of verifying the legitimacy of folks in either camp. As a midwife with the NHS, she seems to view it all with a bit of skepticism. But I know there is legitimately good, healing work within wellness. And yet, I’m worried. It seems too easy to participate in the wellness industry because you can do so with or without anything to legitimize your participation.
All you have to do is announce yourself as a coach, guide, intuitive, reader, healer, etc. and start an Instagram page. That’s it. Oh, and have pretty pictures. And some people truly are what they say they are. Others it’s hard to discern. I can’t tell you how many folks I’ve seen charging very large amounts of money for 1:1 sessions or year long programs or products and when I try to find what their training is there’s nothing. Where did they get the specialized knowledge they need to complete this work? How can I trust them? Often, it’s also not as though they’re working with the wisdom of age, or something. I’ve seen so many folks, mostly women, announce themselves as authorities on this or that and they’re not yet thirty. No training, no mentoring, still quite young. Seems fishy.
In the attention economy, what gets you seen—and presumably sometimes paid—is the algorithm. Not skill, not training, not competency, not even truth.
Sometimes, alls well. Sometimes there is training or experiences to back up the work they do, even if for some reason that isn’t documented. Sometimes it’s pure grift. But so many times it’s hard to tell which is which.
Some grifts—“small scaling swindling” you might call it—have been uncovered and made plain. I remember when the massive grift conducted by Belle Gibson came to light. It was truly shocking. And there are others more recent.4 There’s a grifter born—or at least making an Instagram or TikTok—every minute, I’d wager. And why not? They can participate in a trillion dollar industry under capitalism. There’s a large client-base…or someone to con.
And then I think there is even muddier territory: people who truly believe what they’re selling, whether or not it really works.
Meanwhile, people are hurting. People need healing. People are looking for answers to make their lives livable. I cannot tell you the amount of questionable or downright misleading information I’ve seen presented online. I’ve been taken in by some of it myself.
Pair that with the lack of essential knowledge we’re given about our bodies. Did your education drill into how your kidneys work or where your pituitary gland is? No? Mine neither. And yet at just shy of thirty-one I feel like that would have been much nicer to know than how to do algebra or what happened during the American Revolution. How can we assess the legitimacy of various wellness claims if we don’t have a solid grip on how our bodies work? How can we have informed consent, for that matter?
I wonder, is the wellness industry—even the smaller players in this very large production—afflicted with the same disease as the Western medical model? Is true health and healing allergic to being bought and sold?
If we are the height of wellness culture what happens when it, as it inevitably will, falls back to earth? Who will be hurt, or at the very least not helped, in the process of this rise and fall? Who has already been hurt?
I think about how my own story went, which sounds rather a lot like many stories I’ve heard. I was fine, then suddenly I got sick and no one could figure out why. Conventional medicine failed me, again and again. Doctors ignored me, gaslit me, told me my blood work was “normal” and prescribed me depression medication I didn’t want.5
I was chronically ill for a decade. I Googled and Googled. I was told I maybe had cancer by WebMD a hundred times. Then, once I tried it, alternative medicine failed me too, again and again. I ordered this supplement and that supplemented. I paid out of pocket for practitioners who lied to me. I was doing health largely alone, isolated, through my computer or phone screen.
When did I get well? When health became relational.
It was when my husband devoted hours and hours to researching for me. It was when I met my GP who decided to care for me as a person. It was when I found my bodyworker who has become a dear friend. It was when I got a therapist. It was when I came home to myself, my body, and the earth.
Don’t get me wrong—there was still money involved. We’re still under capitalism. My husband and I have spent thousands of dollars to improve my quality of life. And sometimes that got us something. Sometimes it didn’t.
Money should not determine your access to healthcare, healing, preventive medicine, or quality of life care. And I can say that until I’m blue in the face but that’s not budging anytime soon.
So can we forge a different way? I think it isn’t just conventional medicine v alternative medicine. There must be different ways to do both, and different ways for the two to engage with each other.
As I think about how I might participate in wellness as a potential practitioner, I think about what a fertility awareness educator I spoke to said.6 She’s not currently practicing, and she was refreshingly honest with me about that. As we chatted, she advised me that whatever I chose to do let it be to fulfill a need within the community. I have not stopped thinking about this since. Be informed by what your community needs.
This reminds me too of what I wrote about last week, and what I’m starting to wonder might be a solution to the things that ail us in many areas of the modern day. Isn’t being informed by the needs of your community an element of bioregionalism? And if you are aware of the needs your community has, then you are in relationship with its members.
Is a different way of health and healing relational, bioregional, cooperative care? Can wellness tumble down from its thin air, trillion dollar summit and become grounded again?
Is it possible for the needs of the community to be enough? I don’t know. I’ve not yet met a community that didn’t have a lot of needs. Perhaps this is a place to begin, rather than stop. Beginning there rather than what feeds the algorithm, or what we’re used to seeing presented on social media.
And what does this even look like? I’m trying to find examples but it’s proving incredibly difficult. I remember years ago listening to a podcast about Occupy Medical.7 It gave me some hope. I think too about how health and healing might have been done before capitalism. Of course, we can’t go back to that but what can it teach us? Similarity, what of non-Western, non-capitalistic and/or non-patriarchal medical systems?
For myself, what do I do, if I am meant to be a healer? Do I dive into training? Right now, I’m not established in a community so I think I must be patient. I’m focusing on gaining knowledge rather than gaining credentials. For a while I thought I had to become an expert, and now I wonder if I can be generalist. How do I stay grounded as I move into healing work? How do I keep my ego out of it and keep my eye on relating with the ones around me?
For now, I have these essays. This is where is begins, I think.
UPDATE 8/30/23: If this essay interested you, I might recommend the latest episode of Love & Light Confessionals on the coaching industry.
I would love to hear from you in the comments?
🌀 Have you been hurt by the Western medical model? Have you been hurt by wellness?
🌀 What are the needs you have in your healing that are not being met?
🌀 What are the healing and health needs you see in your own community?
Or, share whatever you would like to share.
The world of training for fertility awareness is also super strange. There are only two programs available for certification in the US.
And that is a story for another day. Or, if you cannot wait, go visit the Lady’s Illness Library by
.MLMs being an example. But also individuals. I won’t name other names…if you’ve seen ‘em, you know ‘em.
And there is nothing wrong with taking medication for depression. But I knew that wasn’t the root cause of my illness and I wanted to get to the deeper reason. In the end, I was right.
Gabrielle, if you’re reading, thank you.