The Wellness industry has taken a new turn and is going in a very weird direction. Before we get into the details and explain why, let’s first cover a few basics.
The word “Wellness” sounds positive, but lurking just under the glimmering surface resides a bubbling cauldron of hideous slime and muck. Ingest this at your peril. While there might indeed be sincere and well-meaning practitioners who strive to encourage you to make good lifestyle choices, the arena is awash with nefarious rogues, sharks, and charlatans. These are the modern-day snake-oil salesmen whose only motive is to enrich themselves by conning you and bleeding you dry with pure unadulterated quackery.
In other words, treat the word “wellness” as a bit of a red flag, and also remember to weld your wallet closed whenever you encounter it.
The problem is this.
There are certain professions such as medicine where you can’t just put out a shingle and and give it a go. You need to be licensed. That involves consuming vast quantities of knowledge and then demonstrating that you can safely and ethically deploy that knowledge. Wellness is not a protected term. Literally anybody can label themselves a wellness practitioner with no professional training at all.
Permit me to rant for a few paragraphs, it’s one of my hot buttons
COVID tore back the veil and revealed the entire field to be a maelstrom of misinformation. Blatant denial of evidence-based medicine was combined with pure quackery. If you dared to accept the supposedly “experimental” vaccine then you were not only promised magnetic superpowers and vastly improved 5G via the supposed nano-bots it contained, but you were also assured that you would be dead by now. The ridiculousness of some of the claims was bizarre, and yet many believed.
Despite taking the vaccine I’ve very tragically had to withdraw my avengers application because the magnetic superpower I was promised is a dud, and as for my 5G reception, it’s still crap.
Meanwhile the wagon train peopled by these cowboys rolled on. Anytime somebody significant passed away, the “Died Suddenly” quacks would leap in to claim, on the basis of no evidence at all, that it is all the fault of the vaccine.
What we do have is a literal body-count of people who would be alive if they had not bought into the bullshit. Of the one million US citizens that died of COVID, up to roughly a third would have probably been saved if they had chosen to be vaccinated.
Let’s also not forget that we all lived in a world where Fox News hosts would vigorously promote much of this ant-vaccine BS, while nearly all of them were themselves vaccinated. Ingesting their BS was just for you and clearly not meant for them because they wanted the stuff that really did work.
We also associate the anti-vax /anti-mask stance as a highly politicised topic where one side was, and still is, science and evidence-based, and the other embraced the promoters of pure quackery as truth tellers. This has had an inevitable measurable consequences – “the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters” after vaccine eligibility was opened.
Where am I going with all this?
Something deeply weird has now become apparent.
CNN Flags Up a New problem
If you are pro-science then it is highly probable that you are already aware of the issues with “wellness”. However, if you read a recent CNN article then you might have been a tad surprised by what it revealed.
Within the article titled “Wellness influencers fueled pandemic misinformation. Now they’re targeting another crisis“, they highlight a new twist to all of this, one that might not at first make any sense at all …
…Wellness influencer @truth_crunchy_mama told her 37,000 followers to “stop blaming things on nature that were actually caused by the government.” They’re “going to keep setting wildfires until we all submit to their climate change agenda,” she said in another post.
Health influencer @drmercola suggested to his 504,000 followers whether, while the media focused on climate change, the fires might have been deliberately set to “to facilitate a land grab” to make the area a “smart city” — referring to a technology-focused urban design idea.
A natural parenting influencer, whose Instagram page is filled with soft-focus pictures of herself against pretty pastel backgrounds, implied to her 76,000-strong community that Hawaii’s wildfires were started by “directed energy weapons” — systems which use energy such as laser beams.
…
Cécile Simmons, a trained yoga teacher, was surprised when many of the wellness accounts she followed started posting about climate change. “It just started popping up in my feed and I thought OK, that’s interesting, now that COVID is ‘over’ they’re diversifying the narrative,” she told CNN.
Wait a second, wellness influences are now attacking Climate Science, WTF is going on here?
I get why these promoters of quackery are opposed to evidence-based medicine. They want to you distrust it and instead embrace their stuff so that they can then proceed to peddle their very own alternative “solutions” to you. The “Don’t trust the vaccine, it will kill you” narrative makes sense because their goal is to sell you alternatives, and by doing so enrich themselves by selling useless snake oil.
So why on earth are many of these wellness quacks now targeting climate science, a topic that is way outside their claimed remit?
Mercola
CNN reached out to Dr Mercola and challenged him directly to explain himself.
The response from this “doctor”, who has not actually practised medicine since 2009 because he found conning people into buying worthless supplements to be far more profitable, advised …
“humans are absolutely impacting the environment and the climate.” When asked about his comments on Hawaii’s wildfires, he said he accepts the consensus that dry conditions and strong winds fueled the blaze. “It was never stated that it was definitely intentional,” he said, “although some have speculated that is a possibility.”
Well yes, this is indeed classic Mercola. If you are familiar with him then you will appreciate that he survives as the king of the quacks by surfing a hair’s breath under the FTC and FDA radar. By being evasive like this and not boldly saying anything but instead simply “suggests” … “might be” … he then tops and tails any challenges with his usual, “but of course the science … I’m just asking questions” BS. After decades in the arena he knows where the line is and so he will deploy very carefully phrased narratives that he can rapidly disown if challenged.
Luckily the author of the CNN article is on the ball here and is having none of it. She did recognise the game being played, and so calls it out …
His climate posts are often framed in this way, not making definitive claims but rather asking questions like: Is the idea of eating insects “part of globalists’ ‘green agenda?’” Or advertising guest posts suggesting the “war on climate change” follows “the same playbook used by nefarious individuals who lust for complete power over the citizens.”
Why is the $5.6 Billion Wellness industry going after Climate Change?
It’s an inevitable outcome of the psychology in play.
When the core of your business involves quackery then you will very obviously be faced with evidence-based science spotlighting it all and announcing “Here be quackery”.
To push back, the wellness quacks only have one basic card to play. That’s the card labelled “Conspiracy”. In other words, they create a narrative of distrust for the conflicting evidence that judges and condemns them. Claims such as “Big Pharma”, or “Big Government” is out doing nefarious stuff and is suppressing the truth, so buy my magic supplements that they want to keep you from having because they will cure all your ills.
The beauty of a conspiracy is that you can simply make anything up – no evidence needed. Just nurture a trusting relationship with your marks via hot emotional issues and gently reel them in.
If indeed the magic supplements being offered really worked, then why does mainstream medicine reject it? The answer is always some grand conspiracy claim – “they” want to suppress cheap treatments and keep you hooked on their stuff. Honestly now, who seriously buys into the idea that the health insurers actually want their profits eaten up if there really were cheaper alternatives that actually worked available.
Yes, but why climate change?
If indeed the core of what you do panders to conspiracies and extreme individualism, then a distrust of “them” regarding anything and everything that frightens you is a very reassuring message to embrace. The concerns regarding climate change are indeed very disturbing and also for the record robustly valid, so selling a narrative that opposes it is a wellness offering that relieves the mental stress.
If you were seriously ill and were faced with some telling you that you needed to radically alter your lifestyle and diet and others telling you that you are actually fine and it will all just go away soon, just carry on, then what do you do?
Some will of course be analytical and accept what the evidence tells them and then make the hard lifestyle changes, but others may indeed not go there at all. Their Wellness “friend” whom they are inclined to trust is what they opt for, and so they reject the evidence coming from the subject matter experts and opt to simply pop a few supplements instead.
Again, why does wellness go after climate change?
Because it all plays into a way of thinking about the world. It’s us vs “the big bad nefarious “them”. Don’t trust subject matter experts because they are paid pawns and part of the conspiracy.
“Do your own research” is a common phrase bandied about which simply means that you should tune into the disinformation churned out by influencers and consume all they offer uncritically.
Buzzwords abound … “natural health” … “silent killer” … “sign up here” (to enjoy basking in hosepipe of disinformation) … “click for a FREE report” …”take control of your health” …”studies confirm COVID Jab will harm you” (they don’t, it’s BS) … “one day only, 40% off Cod liver oil” (which turns out to be an offer made every day and is at an absurdly high price) … etc…
Many consume and ingest the identity promoted by “wellness” and so it becomes a core part of who they are, a stance that is almost akin to religion.
What could possibly go wrong?
COVID revealed exactly what happens to those that bought into this narrative – many died, and many others now have long COVID.
With a conspiratorial distrust of subject matter experts it is not a huge leap to now target climate science and so the charlatans continue to suck money from those they nurture via a manufactured rage against “them”.
Caveat emptor, quia ignorare non debuit quod jus alienum emit
(“Let a purchaser beware, for he ought not to be ignorant of the nature of the property which he is buying from another party.”)
Further Reading
- Joseph Mercola’s wikipedia page does indeed tell you what he is really all about. He is one of the biggest peddlers of quackery and disinformation today – his goal is not your wellbeing, but rather to make himself rich by conning you. The fact that he is the quackery king is not accidental, because over decades he has refined his pitch. For example he will typically utilise A/B marketing where he will try TypeA and TypeB campaigns, and learn from that which is truly effective and discard what does not work.
- Another well known promoter of quackery and disinformation is Erin Elizabeth. The fascinating revelation about her is that she is also Mercola’s wife.
- CCDH report of COVID Disinformation identifies the 12 people who generated most of it – almost two-thirds of anti‑vaccine content circulating on social media came form just them. (Mercola is No.1 and Erin Elizabeth is No.7)