Well-ness
The chronically sick rarely get to enjoy wellness culture. You need the disposable wealth of the well-off to access the wellspring of water circuits; a baseline of normative function to qualify for the cult fitness classes of the ‘post-’pandemic. At my gym, you literally need stair-steady legs to reach the spin studio in the basement or the HIIT room on the second floor. And while good instructors will tell you to “listen to your body first and me second”, there are no adapted bikes or recumbent options, no railings to support transfer from wheelchair to mat, no membership discounts for people on disability assistance. The entry price to spaces of luxurious leisure is money and owning a body that needs toning not triage and fits into a standard training template and a pilates princess matching set.
Well can mean good, appropriate, fortunate, kind, approving, advantageous, prosperous, thorough, deep, intimate, sustained, or probable. As an exclamation, it can agree, pivot, prompt, or punctuate. Well done is either praise or a cooking outcome. Well well well suggests not wellness in triplicate but a knowing surprise. Wellness as noun is both the state of good health and fortune and it’s pursuit; the ability to run and the act of running. At my most sick, all my energy was devoted to not dying, the pursuit of wellness was as out of reach as the condo gym I couldn’t walk to, the activities of fending off death far less instagrammable than workouts.
The disparity in aesthetic ambiance and service standards between “wellness” and the health care system blinks starkly. When I got sick, I patch-worked an entire team of paramedical professionals in private practice trying to patch me back together long before I saw anyone more specialized than a family doctor.
With disposable income, I can buy red light therapy or acupuncture in a lush dark room far more easily than I can access a hospital-bright ER or reach my mainstream doctors for a consult. Money buys you the privacy of a private hot-cold-circuit or a massage but in Canada it cannot fast-track you to medical-grade treatment. Recently, it took me 24hrs to get an ultrasound for a sports injury; 24 months post-covid to get an echocardiogram using an identical machine for post-viral complications. In the diagnostic lab change room, the mirror was meant to help you tie the hospital gown, not for well-lit fit-check.
As Olivia Stren writes in a Toronto Life article on the 2020s wellness trend of cold plunges and saunas: “we live in a time when intensity serves as a stand-in for virtue." One of her interviewees, the owner of a “modern bathhouse” says that in a world where everything is both too hard (commuting) and too easy (ordering takeout), “we need more comfort and more discomfort.”
Maybe this is why I feel out of place in cult-favourite wellness facilities. The sick body is rarely comfortable or at ease; there is always pain or dysfunction alarming the nociceptors, even when we appear well on the surface. In many chronic conditions, biological homeostasis itself is disrupted, the body struggling to adjust to changes in position or environment, including temperature. It has taken several medications for me to tolerate a hot tub or a cold open-water swim without risking short-circuiting my cardiovascular system.
According to the for-profit world of “brain retraining”, these symptoms are merely neurological misinterpretation. You only have tell the symptom to stop, imagine it floating away in a red balloon, or assure yourself you are safe, and your ruptured blood vessels linings will repair themselves, your calcified lungs will reinstall, your elevated inflammatory markers will recede, and your body will move well again, well-resourced with a deep well of emotional calm. Wellness here is a self-declared mindset, a implemented therapy, not a clinical treatment plan.
In “Pain Reprocessing Therapy”, patients with all manner of real world injury are told to teach themselves that despite their scans and diagnoses, their pain has no physiological cause. Instead of seeking treatment, they seek out and rationalize away the pain-triggering emotions, and replace them with positive visualizations or the real-world sensations of soft cushions or fine fabric or hot water. A friend and I joke that instead of yoga, patients are now told to “take a bath about it”.
Every efficacy study I’ve read is deeply flawed. If you compare a patient given no intervention, and those given group-therapy ‘cures’ and told it’s their only option, they will likely rate it better than nothing. Better to be believed then to be left to rot in the endless waiting rooms of specialist referrals.
The pursuit of wellness while sick for me remains a little alien. I’m several years behind the ‘post’-pandemic shift from virtual classes to breathing the same hot air; still adjusting to wellnesses’ proximity (“to know someone well”) and intensification (to do something “damn well”). I remain well enough (well-off enough, well-healed enough) to participate, as long as I continue the far less aesthetic work of chopping pills in half to perfect the dosage and monitoring my blood pressure before and after class.
The Impairing Curse is a long-form, serialized experiment in personal essay, science journalism, policy analysis, and poetry. To start at the beginning and read it in order, go to the first essay or read about the aesthetics and labour of illness, the science of salt, and the failures of public health. To support this project, share it online or subscribe. The series is intentionally not behind a paywall, to ensure broad access to patients and timely circulation of information in our evolving public health crisis, but paid subscriptions are welcome.