12/09/2026
There is something deeply wrong with the modern wellness industry, and the more I look at what it has become, the more I wonder what the old medicine keepers, philosophers and mystics would make of the world we have created around healing.
There was a time when knowledge was not something you claimed because you had heard it once, attended a retreat or completed a short course. It was carried for years, sometimes for a lifetime, until life had tested you enough to strip away your certainty and teach you the difference between knowing the words of a teaching and actually understanding what those words mean.
A medicine man did not become a medicine man because he had a certificate, a following or a good story. He learned by watching the land, the plants, the elders and the people who came to him carrying illness, grief, pain and questions that did not always have easy answers, and he understood that before you carried medicine for another human being, you had to have lived enough, failed enough, listened enough and been humbled enough to know when your knowledge was useful and when it was simply your ego wanting to believe it knew.
Look at wellness now and tell me we have not lost something.
Someone attends a retreat and starts teaching spirituality. Someone completes a short training and calls themselves a healer. Someone learns breathwork, trauma language, energy or plant medicine and suddenly they have a method, a course and an opinion on how everybody else should heal.
The words are travelling faster than the wisdom behind them.
Social media has made this worse because an algorithm cannot tell the difference between somebody who has spent thirty years studying the human body, consciousness and healing and somebody who discovered it three months ago. It recognises attention, not wisdom, which means the person who performs certainty well can appear more credible than the person who has quietly spent half a lifetime doing the work.
And perhaps this is the question we need to start asking again:
What have you actually lived, studied, witnessed and understood deeply enough to be trusted with another human being?
Because real wisdom does not make you more impressed with yourself. It makes you more humble, more careful and far more aware of the responsibility involved when somebody places their health, their pain or their vulnerability in your hands.
There is a profound difference between carrying medicine and carrying content.
And I think the wellness industry has forgotten the difference.
