• by Les Luchter , January 31, 2024

Medicine is “invading” the wellness market at an “astounding” speed, according to the annual “Future of Wellness” report from the Global Wellness Summit (GWS).

This is most apparent in weight-loss and longevity, according to GWS.

Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro have “upended” behavior-change-focused wellness businesses, GWS says. These businesses include dieting platforms like WW (formerly Weight Watchers) and Noom, which have quickly pivoted to prescribe “Big Pharma’s magic pricks,” along with gyms and wellness resorts.

For 2024, the report predicts “a wellness check for weight loss drugs” with the wellness industry creating “companion” programs for the drug-takers along with “fully integrative, whole-health weight-loss approaches spanning everything from nutrition coaching to fitness to mental health services to advanced metabolic health analysis.”

The future, GWS says, will see “evidence-based methods that could help get people off these ‘forever’ drugs and that specifically improve their health while on them.”

In the longevity category, the number of “highly medical, high-tech (and high-priced)” longevity clinics, offering everything from advanced diagnostic testing to stem cell treatments to plasma exchange, is growing rapidly and now totals 1,000 worldwide.

While “longevity has longevity,” the report says that in 2024, some hard questions will be asked: “Are we entering a future where only the poor age? How can most people afford to live to 130? What is the impact of a ‘never die’ mindset on our mental health and on the death-acceptance movement?”

GWS places longevity clinics and those businesses using weight-loss drugs into what it terms a “hardcore” market and mindset.

This hardcore market is defined as “the new hyper-medical, high-tech, even more expensive wellness market.”

Hardcore shares the wellness landscape with what GWS terms the “softcare” market: “desires for a low-pressure, simpler, less expensive, less relentlessly self-optimizing wellness, where emotional and social wellbeing matter most.”

Hardcore and softcore wellness, “very different, even contradictory,” are both growing -- and becoming increasingly polarizing, helped along by generational and income gaps. “The future is both harder and softer care,” GWS says.   

Citing “countless surveys,” the groups says “wellness has never been such an important priority for people as now…But what kind of wellness matters—and for whom—is undergoing serious transformation.”

Meanwhile, GWS’ nonprofit Global Wellness Institute this week reported that the U.S. leads all nations with $1.8 trillion in annual wellness spending – nearly a third of the global total of $5.6 trillion, a figure expected to grow to $8.5 trillion in 2027.