J Clin Gastroenterol. 1996 Sep; 23(2): 94-6.

Is there health in wellness?

Levenstein S.

In the last 20 years, patient autonomy has vastly increased and a "well-being" movement has flourished, with great benefits but with definite drawbacks as well. Exaggeration of the individual's potential for prevention and self-healing can foster a crude psychological reductionism that hampers potential for subtle etiologic understanding and may weaken research, as well as creating a tendency to blame the victim. Probing of the health effects of any activity before engaging in it can lead to healthier-than-thouness and a fear of living. The well-being movement tends to ignore social causes of disease in favor of individual ones and therefore to disregard a need for social remedies. Both theory and practice can be contaminated by economic motives: Medicine is expensive, meditation is cheap. The chasm between the "mind-body" school and the dominant medical model may have widened as some holistically minded individuals, finding a haven in the well-being movement, give up on affecting the medical mainstream. Thus, the advance of holistic medicine has aided in conceptualizing the health-illness continuum, in understanding pathogenesis, and in discovering new preventive and therapeutic tools, but its emphasis on internal causes and therapies should not be allowed to detract resources from the equally important ones lying outside the realm of lifestyle.