Is the 'Wellness Industry' a Scam? One Writer Breaks It Down, From Apple Cider Vinegar to Reiki (Exclusive)

When I first saw Dieux Skin’s CEO Charlotte Palermino declare that the wellness industry was a scam back in October, I couldn’t help but take a long hard look at myself.

I had just started seeing a reiki master because I was going through one of the more chaotic points in my life involving perimenopause, aging parents, a teenager and a puppy. A friend asked me what reiki does and why I was doing it. “It has something to do with energy healing,” I said. The truth was I didn’t know what it did, I just knew I needed something. For the record, reiki is an energy healing technique using light touch or no touch that is supposed to bring about calmness.

Even my reiki master admitted to me that reiki is one of those wellness treatments that’s difficult to explain and only you know if it’s working for you. But her vague description and grounding nature was enough for me. I closed my eyes and stretched out on the table while she guided me through meditation and moved her hands above my body.

Related: I Wrote a Novel About a Real Celebrity — And She 'Can't Wait to Read It' (Exclusive)  

When I was done, I felt relaxed, like my tension, stress, past trauma — all of it — had been released. Could it have been that I was laying still and uninterrupted, listening to Buddhist chanting music without the fear of my puppy terrorizing my boots? Sure. Yet, I handed over $150 to the perfectly lovely reiki master and walked out of the studio. Reader, I went back to her multiple times.

I know I’m not alone in that, in a desperate need to feel better, and despite my own misgivings, I’ll hand over money to a complete stranger. Snake oil salesmen have been professing to cure all sorts of ailments for centuries. My skepticism has even seeped into my unconscious; my new book, You Belong To Me, is about a teenage girl who gets drawn into, of all things, a wellness cult. But even as I ingest handfuls of turmeric, bathe my crystals outside under a full moon, go to the acupuncturist before the ENT and, yes, now regularly see a reiki master, I can’t help but wonder if Palermino is right, that wellness is a scam. And if it is, then why do I keep forking over the money?

I’d have to go back to my relationship with wellness as a whole to understand this question. I was in high school when my father indoctrinated me to the world of supplements; he was a devout follower of Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw’s wellness bible Life Extension a controversial book about how taking massive quantities of supplements including antioxidants and free radicals could add years to your life. You could say they were ahead of their time, but you have to understand that they were also easily two of the weirdest 40-somethings I had ever seen.

The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now!

In television interviews, Sandy, with her big frizzy hair and animal print leggings often bent horseshoes, while the uber-tall Durk, with his teeny tiny workout shorts, a halter top and a large silver western belt slung around his waist, spouted off factual scientific studies. (In one interview, they claimed to cite the work of 386 scientific reports.)

Related: Siblings Escape a Cult, Only to Get Embroiled in a Murder Investigation — See the Cover of Our Last Resort (Exclusive)

My father was a no-nonsense, I talk-you-listen kind of parent, so I wouldn’t have taken him as a Durk and Sandy fan. He wore button-down shirts with khakis and fitted jeans, and looked far from the “woo-woo” type. But my dad had smoked cigarettes for a long time, had struggled with asthma and allergies his whole life and both of his parents died young. Looking back, it makes perfect sense that he was searching for the key to longevity. After all, wellness is about “living your best life” as the industry tells us ad nauseum, it’s about self-exploration, it’s about wanting to have it all, or in my father’s case, it’s about wanting to live years past your parents (which at 83, he has). Can you fault anyone for that?

It shouldn’t have surprised him that right out of college I got a job at a little health food store with a vegan food counter, but my father still complained. “You got a degree in English from NYU. Why are you working at a health food store?” How could I explain that I, a true Gen X’er, a cliche slacker, a vegetarian who protested corporate America, had bought into his alternative lifestyle and was kind of following in his footsteps?

My boss was a big man named Bob with a messy gray beard who told us stories about working as a pyrotechnician for Wendy O. Williams, formerly the frontwoman of the punk band, The Plasmatics. I fell in love with the store. I fell in love with wellness philosophies. It wasn’t just about what you put into your body, though vegan egg salad did become my new go-to lunch — it was about how we lived on this planet. Mother earth. Meat is murder. Acid rain. Wheat grass will save you. My parents called me a hippie, yet wellness was so ... charming. The store with the old oak floor was so charming, the middle-aged writers who hung around the lunch counter ordering vegan BLTs were charming. The rows of amino acids were charming. Even Bob’s weird stories were so utterly charming, until Bob started stealing from our tip jar and sexually harassing some of the young girls who worked there.

Suddenly, those middle-aged writers I was once so charmed by started spouting off advice on how I should live my life — even as they spent all their time sitting at a lunch counter talking to me, a recent college graduate. The old oak floor I once thought of as quaint, was splintery and had deep crevices filled with muck. And after a few months, the customers all started to look like Durk and Sandy, and they seemed to want more than just vitamins — they wanted attention from Bob or maybe they wanted to suck the youth out of us. Bob’s behavior was the last straw. I left that store feeling like the new world I loved wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows as the people who worked there professed.

About six months later, I moved to San Francisco — the birthplace of hippies, though they were long gone by that point — and quickly got a job in a large health food and grocery store called Thom’s Natural Foods, started by a gay couple who had gotten their start selling bulk organic oats in paper bags on the street corner in the 1960s and had been at it ever since.

This was the real deal. This was San Francisco in the '90s, before the internet, before Silicon Valley, before the tech boom and before Amazon bought Whole Foods. Thom’s, and the people who worked there, believed in organic produce from local California farms and clean beauty products (this was before I, or almost anyone, knew what “clean” even meant). My coworkers weren’t creepy old men, they were smart, creative 20-somethings who talked about good gut health, meditation, living off the grid, chakras and nutritional yeast.

Related: PEOPLE’s Best Books of April 2025: A Delectable Memoir by Kristen Kish, New Fiction by Lyla Sage and More

I quickly learned that if you work at a health food store long enough, people ask you for advice. How do I get rid of a fever? Soak your feet in apple cider vinegar. How can I help my asthma and allergies? Take stinging nettles, CoQ10 and turmeric. People wanted answers. “I’m not a doctor, I’m not a naturopath, I’m not even an herbalist,” I’d tell them. “I’m a 25-year-old with an English degree.” They didn’t care. Stick it in my shopping cart. Ring me up.

They had so much hope, so much blind faith, and something about it frightened me. Here, take this blade of grass and it will change your life, I could have said, and many of them would have believed me. I didn’t want that kind of power; I didn’t enjoy that kind of power. They were so hopeful when I filled their baskets with vitamins. But cynicism is the flip side of hope, and soon I began to question every person who came to me for advice, even the people I liked. The whole thing felt icky and I left Thom’s around 1996.

Wellness is a place we turn when doctors fail us. When our bodies fail us. When life fails us. But I only understood this need to heal, to be well, once I stopped working in the wellness world and had enough separation from it to see it more clearly.

Related: Which The White Lotus Character’s Book Club Would You Join?

While my career in that ended, the wellness world forged ahead. By 2003, specialty magazines, newsletters, books and television programming were exploding into what the Oxford Academic Journal called a “wellness revolution.” Today, that revolution has become what’s known as a global wellness economy, which now includes beauty, wellness tourism, wellness real estate, weight loss, nutrition, AI-powered wellness coaches, celebrity supplement brands like Goop and Poosh, and so much, much more, and it’s worth a whopping $6.3 trillion.

But do I really think wellness is a scam? It’s complicated. Let’s just say I can see why many people are skeptical of the industry. These days everything feels like wellness. Yes, you should be skeptical about buying supplements from conspiracy theorists. You probably shouldn’t put ozone in your rectum. You likely should be wary of orgasmic meditation cults. You should know that there’s no real way to measure ambiguous wellness marketing terms like “support,” “stimulates” and “optimizes.”

The reality is, we will never stop aspiring to live longer and feel better because as humans, we were designed for survival. And I ask you, how can you fight that urge to be better, to live better, to look better, to feel better? I don’t know if you can, or you should. We should want to aspire — or at least attempt to aspire — to feel better, whether it’s with wellness products or without.

Does this mean I’ll stop bathing my crystals in moon light or going for reiki once a month? Probably not. Because I have faith that something will cure my ______. Karl Marx said religion was the opiate for the masses, and now we have wellness too.

As long as it can’t physically hurt me, as long as there is no downside, as long as I’m not, for instance, joining a wellness cult like the teenage character in my book, then, as my Jewish grandmother used to say when she was trying to get me, her vegetarian granddaughter, to eat chicken, “A little bit won’t kill you.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer , from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 

Hayley Krischer's You Belong to Me comes out April 15 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

Read the original article on People