Latest / The Brain Dump / The Grift vs. The Science: A Trained Clinician's Response to the Wellness Industry Critique | Episode 22

Transcript

The Grift vs. The Science: A Trained Clinician's Response to the Wellness Industry Critique | Episode 22 · The Brain Dump

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Sandy Boone, therapist, coach, and nervous system educator with 30 years in the health care and mental health fields.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: I built two practices, got diagnosed with ADHD at 50, and learned the hard way that healers need healing to.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: I helped female therapists and healers regulate their nervous systems, reclaim their lives, and stop being everyone's everything.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Braindump with Sandy Boone.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: I've been reading lately.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: Specifically, I've been reading a writer named Matt Hoosy over at a publication called The Brink.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: I think he's smart and I think he's doing important work, and I'm going to respectfully disagree with parts of what he's written.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: Links to both articles are in the show notes.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: I'd actually encourage you to read them because this conversation deserves more than a hot take.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: The pieces are called Sick for Profit, How Wellness Podcasting Sells the Cure It Can't Afford to Give You, and Griftonomics, How Wellness Became the Perfect Con and Then Got Elected.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: And here's my honest reaction after reading both of them.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: He's not wrong.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: The wellness grift is real.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: The diagnosis and sell loop is real.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: The financially conflicted influencers who manufacture your anxiety and then sell you the cure are real.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: The$6.8 trillion wellness industry that profits from keeping you almost well, permanently subscribed, and perpetually one protocol away from feeling better is real.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: And he paints with too broad of a brush.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: And when that brush sweeps across functional medicine and everyone practicing it, we have a problem.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: Because functional medicine practiced by trained, credentialed, ethical clinicians is not the same thing as a podcast host who owns the supplement he's recommending to you.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: And collapsing those two things into the same category is its own kind of intellectual laziness.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: And that's what I want to talk about today.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: Let me start by giving credit when it's due because I think that's important.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: There are people in the wellness space who are doing exactly what Housie describes.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: They're identifying a real wound, naming it compellingly, and then billing you monthly for the naming.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: Forever.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: The protocol never quite works, the journey never quite ends.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: There is always another layer of dysfunction to diagnose, another supplement to add, another test to run.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: I have seen clients arrive in my office having spent months and a significant amount of money getting steadily more frightened of their own food.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: They came in tired and they left tired, poor, and now also convinced they were reacting to seed oils and needed three more tests to find out why.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: This is harm, not dramatic harm, it's quiet, accumulated, expensive harm.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: And the financial conflicts of interest, Hussey documents, are not small.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: When the person recommending the supplement owns equity in the company making it and doesn't tell you, that's not a minor disclosure failure.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: That's a structural behavioral of the trust you extended when you put your headphones in and listened.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: So yes, the grift is real.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: The grift is large.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: The grift is making money hand over fist in a regulatory environment that was basically designed to let it.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: Not because I don't believe in the work, because a lot of the coaching industry operates on a model I don't want to participate in.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: The model where the goal is maximum revenue, maximum dependency, maximum time in your program or your orbit.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: And that's not what I'm trying to build.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: What I'm trying to build is people who get what they need and get out of my office.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: Empowered, resourced, not dependent on me for the rest of their lives.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: This is also my philosophy in the counseling space.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: Come in when you need a little extra support, do the work, leave better, come back if life throws something at you again.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: I don't want clients who need me forever.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: I want clients who heal.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: I recognize that might sound like a terrible business model, and maybe it is, but it is mine.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: And I do want to be compensated because what I bring to the table is real and it costs a lot to build.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: I have tons of expensive trainings, years of clinical work, certifications that required significant time and effort and energy.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: I'm not apologizing for charging for that expertise.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: But there is a difference between being compensated well for genuine expertise and building a business model that requires your clients to stay broken to stay profitable.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: One of those is a business, and the other one is the grift.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: I am not the grift.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: Here's where I push back about those articles.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: Functional medicine, practiced by trained, ethical, and credentialed clinicians who are transparent about their methods, their training, and their financial relationships, is not the wellness grift.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: It is science.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: The gut brain connection is not a podcast talking point.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: It is documented in peer-reviewed research.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: The relationship between mineral status and nervous system function is not a supplement sales pitch.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: It's physiology.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: The idea that root causes matter more than symptom management is not a fringe position.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: It is the direction medicine itself is slowly and perfectly moving toward.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: When I run an HTMA on a client and sit down with them for an hour to walk through what their mineral patterns are telling us about their adrenal function and their nervous system, that is not a diagnose and cell loop.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: That is a trained clinician using a validated tool to look at a person's biochemistry and have an honest conversation about what she's seeing.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: The difference between what I do and what Hussey is critiquing is not subtle.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: It's credential transparency, it's scope of practice.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: It's the presence or absence of financial conflicts.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: It's whether you're selling fear or offering information.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: I also want to name something that gets lost when people attack functional medicine by association with the grift.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: Conventional medicine is not a neutral alternative.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: We have a system where a symptom gets a medication, and then the side effect of that medication gets another medication, and nobody is asking what caused the symptom in the first place.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: That is not root-cause medicine.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: It is symptom management layered on top of symptom management, often for decades, often at a significant cost to the patient's overall health.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: Naming that problem is not a con.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: It's an accurate diagnosis of a broken system.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: Which brings me to the conversation happening right now at the federal level about how America approaches medication, food, and health.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to name names here, but links to relevant context are in the show notes if you want to read further.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: Here is my honest position on that conversation.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: Not everything being said is wrong.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: Ultra-processed food is genuinely harming people.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: The relationship between diet and mental health is real and documented.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: The overprescription of medications for symptoms without addressing underlying causes is a legitimate systematic problem.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: These are not fringe positions.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: These are things I have believed and practiced around for my entire career.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: And you cannot pull the pharmaceutical safety net out from under millions of people and replace it with organic food and functional medicine support when the alternative is inaccessible to most of the population.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: Because organic food is expensive.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: And I know this firsthand.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: I know a lot about nutrition.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: I still get tripped up by green labeling, which is the wellness industry's version of the grift, slapping organic looking packaging on products that are technically legal to call natural while containing GMOs or seedles or both.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: I bought a cereal recently, high protein, no gluten, organic label, and GMOs.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: If I, with my training and my intentionality around food, still get fooled by green labeling, what does that mean for someone who's just trying to feed their family and doesn't have hours to read ingredient lists?
8:21
SPEAKER_00: We don't eat like our grandmothers, and it's worth being honest about why.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: Our grandmothers had gardens, our grandmothers had time structured around the home and cooking.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: They lived in food environment that was not engineered by corporations to maximize consumption of the cheapest possible ingredients.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: We are not lazier than our grandmothers.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: We are running a different life and a different system, and that system was not designed with our health in mind.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: The organic section at most grocery stores is small, expensive, and in many communities nearly nonexistent.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: The appeal to just eat better runs directly into the wall of access, cost, time, and a food industry that spent decades and billions of dollars making the unhealthy option the convenient one.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: So before you pull back on medications that millions of people depend on to function, you need to build the infrastructure that makes the alternative available.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: Not just to people who can afford a weekly farm delivery service, but to everyone.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: Education about how to choose produce, how to cook, how to build a rounded meal without a culinary degree or a two-hour window in the evening.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: Access to food that isn't sprayed with chemicals and engineered for shelf life at the expense of nutrition.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: That infrastructure does not currently exist at scale in this country, and building it takes longer than an executive order.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: I want to name one more thing because I hear it constantly and I'm tired of it.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: People dismissing ideas about food, medication, and root cause health on the basis that the person saying them isn't a doctor or doesn't look healthy enough to be credible.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: Stop.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: That is not a critique.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: That is an ad hominent attack addressed up as skepticism.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: Judge the idea, look at the evidence, engage with the actual argument.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: Whether the person making it has a medical degree or a particular body type is irrelevant to whether the underlying science is sound.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: This works in both directions, by the way.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: Having a degree does not make you right.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: Not having one does not make you wrong.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: What matters is the quality of the evidence, the transparency of the financial relationship, and the honesty of the claims being made.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: Follow the money, check the credentials, ask whether the person selling you the protocol has a financial interest in your continued need for it.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: Ask whether the claims are falsifiable or whether they're structured so that if it doesn't work, the failure is always yours.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: Those are good questions.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: They apply to functional medicine practitioners too, including me.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: You should ask them of me.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: The answer in my case is that I hold clinical licenses in multiple states.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: I trained with credential intuitions, my financial relationships are transparent, and the tools I use have documented science behind them.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: I am not the grift, but I'm also not asking you to take my word for it.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: Let me leave you with something actionable rather than just a critique of a critique.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: If you're trying to eat better in an environment that was not built to help you do that, here are some honest, real-world things that actually help.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: Frozen organic vegetables are often less expensive than fresh and just as nutritious.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: The nutritional value is locked in at harvest.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: That's not a compromise.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: This is smart.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: If you live in the Southeast or Mid-Atlantic, there's a farm to table home delivery service called Ellsworth Foods that delivers natural, preservative-free, hormone-free, steroid-free food directly to your freezer.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: They eliminate the middleman, which means the quality is higher and the cost is closer to what you spend at a regular grocery store.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: It's how I get most of my food.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: I'll put a link in the show notes.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: Learn one new thing about labels at a time rather than trying to overhaul everything at once.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: Start with seed oils or added sugar or one thing that matters to you.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: Nervous system overwhelm from trying to fix everything simultaneously is how people end up back in the drive-thru.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: Cook once, eat twice.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: Batch cooking is not glamorous.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: It also does not require a homemaker lifestyle or a garden.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: It requires a Sunday afternoon and a willingness to eat the same chicken two nights in a row.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: Stop letting perfect be the enemy of better.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: Eating somewhat better is better than eating perfectly for two weeks and then giving up entirely because you found GMOs in your organic cereal.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: Matt Hoosy is asking the right questions.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: Follow the money.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: Watch for the diagnosis and sell loop.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: Demand transparency about financial relationships.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: Be skeptical of protocols that never quite resolve and always need one more tier.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: He is asking those questions about the wrong targets when he flattens everything outside conventional medicine into the same category.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: Functional medicine practiced with credentials, ethics, transparency, and honest science is not the grift.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: It is the thing the grift is imitating.
13:12
SPEAKER_00: And the way you tell them apart is not by dismissing everything that isn't a prescription pad.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: It's by asking the question he's rightly teaching people to ask.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: Follow the money, check the credentials, and demand the transparency.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: Root cause medicine is real, it's science.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: It's not perfect, and neither are the people practicing it.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: But it is worth defending from the brush this painting at all the same color.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being here.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: If something resonated, check the show notes.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: You'll find links to Matt Hoosy's articles at the brink because they're worth reading even when I disagree with parts of them.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: You'll also find a link to Ellsworth Foods if you're in the Southeast or Mid-Atlantic and want a real practical option for cleaner food delivery.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: While you're there, grab my free guide 50 Things I Do to Calm My Freaking Nervous System.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: Come find me on Instagram at the Sandy Bing.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: And if you're a healing professional looking for a community that actually feels good to be in, come join us in the Rooted Calm Collective on Facebook.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: Links for everything are in the show notes.