Health Update: Health Update: Wellness culture isn’t a replacement for accessible healthcare – What Experts Say– What Experts Say.
It’s uncomfortable to see friends taught to interpret clinical trials or memorize metabolic pathways repeatedly fall for pseudoscientific wellness content.
It circulates everywhere, through social media and casual conversations with well-meaning friends and family, so common that it barely registers as pseudoscience at all. On campuses where access to healthcare is limited, pseudoscientific wellness culture can become a substitute.
The most convenient explanation’s ignorance: that students are misled by TikTok, wooed by medical-enough jargon, or just don’t know any better. It’s a reassuring story. If pseudoscience is just an educational failure, then better sources and media literacy should be enough to fix it.
That explanation doesn’t quite hold up on a university campus, where students are, by definition, highly educated, and at the same time, increasingly constrained in their access to healthcare.
Many of those most invested in wellness culture aren’t scientifically illiterate. A UBC study reported that people with higher levels of education are more likely to seek out alternative health practices.
Wellness culture doesn’t position itself in opposition to science so much as alongside it, borrowing its language (case in point: cortisol, inflammation, luteal phase), while offering the certainty and control science can’t. What’s left isn’t exactly anti-science, but a more decisive, sellable, and personalized version of it.
The tendency to turn to wellness pseudoscience makes more sense when you consider how many experience healthcare. Appointments are brief, and wait times can be long. With about 2.5 million Ontarians without a family doctor, access to consistent primary care is limited. When people can’t get the care they need, they may look for answers elsewhere.
Wellness culture has plenty of them. It offers explanations that are simple, individualized, and, most importantly, actionable. At last, there’s something to do.
Health is sold as a matter of balance or optimization, bought by routines and products that slot neatly into already busy schedules. For people living in bodies that are unpredictable and fallible, frustrated with systems that are unable to provide them with the care they need, the promise of control over their own health is understandably seductive. The story wellness culture tells is validating: something is wrong, and, consequently, something can be done about it.
When institutions urge students to prioritize wellness without expanding access to healthcare, they legitimize a marketplace vying to step in. Wellness culture succeeds not because people misunderstand science, but because it’s available when adequate care isn’t. This helps explain why wellness culture appeals even to those who, on paper, should know better.
Some wellness trends are expensive but benign; others have real risks. Wellness culture shouldn’t be dismissed outright, but its pervasiveness reveals the inadequacy of the healthcare available to students. When people turn to wellness culture because they feel rushed, dismissed, or unsupported, facts or information alone won’t be enough to win them back. The problem isn’t what people know—it’s what they’re missing.
Katarina is a fourth-year Life Sciences student and one of The Journal’s Business, Science, and Technology Editors.
Tags
pseudoscience, Student life, Wellness
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