“Big Wellness is four times larger than the pharmaceutical industry,” read a comment on one of my wife’s podcast episodes. “Alex is a shill for Big Wellness.”
I knew based on many years of investigating the pharmaceutical industry that this assertion was a stretch. There’s simply scant chance that the green juicing and creatine economy are making Pfizer look like a mom and pop shop.
But I wondered where this commenter got that stat. Four times seemed specific. I found the report the commenter was referencing, and at face value, the United States “wellness industry” is valued at over $2 trillion, indeed approximately 4x higher than the current valuation of the $600 billion pharmaceutical industry.
But when I dug into the report, I discovered that the the “wellness industry” includes “traditional and complementary medicine,” “wellness real estate,” vaccines, spas, personal care and beauty products, wellness tourism, “public health,” “mental wellness,” “healthy eating,” and many other categories, all of which go undefined or are broadly defined.
So basically, in this context, “wellness” is essentially everything in the American GDP other than the defense industry.
But what if we used a better honed definition? And what about the heart of accusation itself? Is my wife simply selling wellness products to people fleeing Big Pharma, promising them a better life in Big Wellness? And is it all a grift?