Wellness Nomad | Alternative Medicine Specialist
A guest came to a consultation holding a printed report. Two pages, glossy, a dial with the needle sitting comfortably in the green.
It told her that her biological age was eleven years below the number on her passport.
She had paid a little over two thousand dollars for it at a clinic in another country, as part of a package that included an intravenous infusion and supplements she could not name.
She wanted to know one thing. Was it real.
I could not give her a clean answer. Neither could the clinic, though nobody there had told her that.
She paid two thousand dollars for a number. What she was buying was reassurance, and reassurance is far cheaper to manufacture than evidence.
Two words, one set of sceptics
Two words dominate almost everything I read at the moment. Artificial intelligence, and wellness.
Around AI there is now a real apparatus of doubt. An international network of AI safety institutes formed in late 2024 with ten founding members. Europe legislated. Researchers publish adversarial work on the systems their own employers build. Journalists have made a permanent beat of it. The criticism is loud, funded, institutional, and most of it comes from inside the field.
Around wellness there is almost nothing of the kind.
The Global Wellness Institute put the wellness economy at 6.8 trillion dollars in 2024, growing 7.9 per cent in a single year and forecast to reach 9.8 trillion by 2029. Wellness tourism is 894 billion of it. Traditional and complementary medicine, the category now absorbing longevity and biohacking, is 606 billion, and the second fastest-growing segment in the economy.
An industry of that size has a critical literature you could fit inside a hotel drawer.
What the silence costs
I have sat in menu meetings where a longevity module was approved on a supplier deck and a margin calculation. No clinical review. No contraindication protocol. Nobody in the room able to say what the evidence actually showed, and nobody whose job it was to ask.
Then the device arrives. The therapist is certified over two days by the vendor who sold it. The guest is sixty-eight and on anticoagulants, and the consultation form has three questions.
That sequence is not rare and it is not anyone’s malice. It is what happens when an industry scales faster than its capacity to examine itself.
The absence of criticism does not make an industry safe. It makes it unexamined, which is a different condition, and a more expensive one.
I should be exact about what I am not saying. I am not saying wellness is a fraud. I trained in naturopathy, I have practised for sixteen years across four continents, and I have watched natural medicine help people in ways I can describe accurately and cannot always prove. I am equally aware that parts of my own field rest on evidence thinner than I would like. A practitioner who will not say that out loud is selling something. Nor am I calling for regulation — almost all of what concerns me is entirely legal.
Doubt is not the opposite of belief
The AI field understood something wellness has not. Its critics are not its enemies. They are the reason a serious person can take the field seriously.
Every discipline that matured did it the same way. It built an internal culture willing to state in public that this part works, that part does not, and this third part we do not yet know.
Wellness skipped that stage and went straight to scale. We have built the market without building the science of the market.
Why I am telling you this
Because if you run a property, this is a P&L question before it is a philosophical one.
When you buy a longevity service you are not buying an amenity. You are buying a clinical liability with a spa margin attached. The nervous system is the design brief for everything we build — downregulation, guest safety, mental lightness — and none of those three survives a treatment your own team cannot explain.
The practical test is short. For every modality on your menu, someone in your organisation should be able to say what it does, what it does not do, who must not receive it, and how you would know if something had gone wrong. If nobody can answer those four questions, you do not have a wellness programme. You have a supplier relationship.
So I intend to keep writing about this. Not to name clinics or practitioners — that is a cheap move and a legal problem, and the failure is structural, not personal. But to argue in public that this industry needs the one thing AI already has. People inside it who are willing to be its critics.
The guest went home still not knowing whether her number meant anything. She had been sold a certainty that the science has not yet earned, and she had been sold it by people who were, in every other respect, kind to her.
On the menu you signed off last quarter — who was in the room whose job it was to say no?
If you are reviewing a menu, opening a property, or repositioning one, the consulting and advisory work is where that conversation begins.
A version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn.