Where did this wellness craze spring from?

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This was published 7 years ago

Where did this wellness craze spring from?

By Keith Austin
Bathers enjoy the rooftop pool at the Thermae Bath Spa in the snow in Bath, England.

Bathers enjoy the rooftop pool at the Thermae Bath Spa in the snow in Bath, England.Credit: Getty Images

Wellness tourism, some sources suggest, began with the Mesopotamians in the 3rd century BC. They would travel long distances to a temple in the city of Tell Brak (today's northern Syria) in search of cures for eye ailments.

What they did when they got there is anybody's guess but given that Mesopotamia is widely considered to be one of the cradles of civilisation and they invented, among other things, the wheel, you'd probably give them the benefit of the doubt regarding cures. Then again, these would also have been the same people who foretold the future by rummaging around in goat entrails so the jury's out as to whether the Eye Temple cure was ultimately efficacious.

The word "wellness" might have been coined only in about 1650 (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) but the idea has been around a lot longer than that.

Throughout human history, people – whether Babylonians, ancient Egyptians, Native Americans, Greeks and Romans – have been fascinated by the healing properties of water. Archaeological digs around the world have found evidence of weapons, offerings and complex bathing rituals around rivers, wells and, especially, hot springs.

You would have still got a good, cheap massage in old Siam before the 1st century BC and the Japanese have been jumping in and out of onsen for about 1300 years. Let's not even get started on the Indians and their ayurvedic treatments and ashrams.

In the Western world, though, it fell to the Greeks and Romans to advance the cause of the health "industry" by taking their bizarre notions of bathing and cleanliness to the far-flung corners of their world.

First, the Greeks started including baths, wash basins and foot baths in their temple complexes and then extended that to public baths within their gymnasia. The Spartans supposedly developed a vapour bath. The Greeks were probably the sweetest smelling people in Europe at that time.

The Romans, in turn, took the Greek bathing practices and expanded them, thanks in part to the invention of the aqueduct, which made moving water easier. Where they could, they also tried to build their baths around existing hot springs as they were great believers in mineral waters for the relief of rheumatism, arthritis and dyspepsia.

In addition, Roman bath-houses (thermae) differed architecturally from their Greek forebears in that they tended to have separate changing rooms, massage rooms, steam rooms and swimming pools. Even today, 1500 years after the Romans left Britain, the well-preserved remains of the bath-house in the city of Bath resemble the modern, multistorey spa complex just around the corner. It's called, of course, Thermae.

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With the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, there was also a decline and fall in bathing – though travelling to natural springs and supposedly "holy" wells for cures never truly went out of vogue. With a few exceptions (Spa, the Belgian town which gave its name to every spa in the world, was established in the 14th century), it wasn't until the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries that the idea of "taking the waters" for one's health began to capture the public's imagination.

In some instances, this expression was taken literally, with physicians prescribing all manner of oddball cures based on little evidence. In Karlsbad, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), patients in the 16th century were advised to bathe in the mineral waters for up to 11 hours over several days – or until pustules formed on the skin and erupted to release the inner poisons. You also had to drink the stuff, too.

It was about this time that spas began springing up all over the place as people began to "discover" the so-called beneficial health properties of the waters. In 1626 the English seaside town of Scarborough started talking up the health-giving properties of an acidic stream that, one would assume, had been there for some time.

It was pretty much a local secret until 1660 when a book by one Dr Robert Wittie put the place on the map. The snappily titled Scarborough Spaw or A Description of the Nature and Vertues of the Spaw at Scarbrough in Yorkshire advised that a mere five or so pints of the waters daily could cure excessive wind, constipation, melancholy and various diseases of the head and lungs.

Regular dips in the nearby ocean, added the good doctor, would also cure gout – thus ensuring a steady stream of visitors to what was essentially Britain's first seaside health resort.

The health "resort-cum-spa" was well established throughout Europe by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with specific exercises and diets added to the water cures. There were even several guidebooks written explaining the individual medical benefits of each place.

What was to become one of the most famous health resorts in the world was started in 1867 when Dr John Harvey Kellogg, (of breakfast cereal fame), started a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, with a focus on a low-fat diet, exercise and frequent enemas.

Kellogg described his system – later expounded on in his book The Road to Wellness – as "a composite physiologic method comprising hydrotherapy, phototherapy, thermotherapy, electrotherapy, mechanotherapy, dietetics, physical culture, cold-air cure, and health training".

He also encouraged circumcision, a trend so far not taken up by the modern wellness industry but give 'em time.

Among the great and the good to attend the Battle Creek sanitarium were Warren G. Harding, the 29th president of the US, Amelia Earhart, Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller and car mogul Henry Ford. The Wall Street crash of 1929, though, put paid to many of the formerly well-to-do patients and the place went into administration in 1933.

Spas and health resorts continued to thrive in the post-war years but it wasn't until the late 1970s and 1980s that the word "wellness" started to make inroads into the health industry. According to a story in the New York Times Magazine in 2010 it was journalist Dan Rather who, in 1979, introduced a 60 Minutes story on the new health movement and said: "Wellness. There's a word you don't hear every day."

Almost 40 years later you'd be lucky not to hear it every day. There are wellness magazines, wellness retreats, road maps to wellness, wellness solutions, wellness worlds, wellness centres and even, I kid you not, a tomato wellness website (tomatowellness.com) where you can download a free Tomato Products Wellness Toolkit and sign up to a Tomato Wellness Newsletter.

A quick Google search of "wellness products" throws up 10.3 million links to things such as a brand of wellness pet food (motto: We do more than make pet food. We create Wellness™).

But whether you call it "wellness" or simply "health" the tourism industry surrounding it is big business.

In its fourth edition of travel trends and statistics published in April this year the Centre for Responsible Travel (CREST) said wellness tourism was "already a $US439-billion market, and is set to grow to $US678.5 billion by 2017", adding that wellness tourists spend, on average, 130 per cent more than the average global tourist.

In the report, Susie Ellis, president of Spafinder Wellness Inc, said: "In my 13 years researching this annual report [Top 10 Global Spa & Wellness Trends Forecast] what's most exciting to me is watching trends that initially seem surprising, ultimately have long-term staying power. And in all those years of crystal-ball-gazing, I've never seen wellness travel so powerfully dominate the forecast like it does in 2016."

And to put its money where its mouth is, Spafinder Wellness this year launched a global Wellness App which helps consumers find, book and pay for treatments at more than 25,000 yoga and Pilates studios, fitness clubs, spas, salons, wellness travel destinations and "wellness providers" such as Canyon Ranch, Elemis and the Massage on Demand company.

In Spafinder's 2015 Wellness Travel Awards a panel of 33 wellness travel "experts" nominated 509 properties for the awards and 273 were named finalists. More than 10,000 consumers voted to choose the winners.

The Best in Australia/New Zealand award went to the adults-only Gwinganna Lifestyle Retreat in the Tallebudgera Valley, Queensland. The 33-room spa sanctuary opened in 2006 and offers everything from wellness weekends to seven-day detox programs and specialty retreats centred around sleep and nutrition.

Wellness, then, is where it's at. It's a concept and a word that has transformed, according to the Global Wellness Institute (GWI), "every industry from food and beverage to travel". In 2014, it says, more than half of global employers were using health promotion strategies while a third had invested in wellness programs.

According to the latest GWI research, the global wellness industry is a $US3.4 trillion market – a market it breaks down into 10 sectors thus: Beauty & Anti-Ageing ($1.03 trillion), Healthy Eating/Nutrition/Weight Loss ($574 billion), Fitness & Mind-Body ($446 billion), Wellness Tourism ($494 billion), Preventative/Personalised Health ($433 billion), Complementary/Alternative Medicine ($187 billion), Wellness Lifestyle Real Estate ($100 billion), Spa Industry ($94 billion), Thermal/Mineral Springs ($50 billion) and Workplace Wellness ($41 billion).

Apart from wondering what "Wellness Lifestyle Real Estate" might be, that's a lot of zeroes.

It's quite a journey from the Eye Temple and Cleopatra's supposed spa resort on the shores of the Dead Sea in 25 BC. But look how far we've come – you can now get a "Trump Wellness Nourish Meal" as part of the Trump Wellness Program at one of the five-star Trump Hotels Collection.

And whatever else is in it, you know it's not going to include humble pie.

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