With COVID-19 still fresh in everyone’s minds and talks of bird flu on the horizon, the quest for health has never been more at the forefront of everyone’s mind. However, trusting where to find this optimum health has become muddled over the past years. Wellness medicine has emerged as a global juggernaut, promising a preventative approach to avoiding disease that has been welcomed with open arms by society yet cast as snake oil by traditional medicine health practitioners who equate it to the modern-day version of snake oil.
Wellness medicine is a modern approach to healthcare that focuses on preventing illness and promoting overall well-being rather than just treating disease states with medications or surgery. It involves a holistic view of health, emphasizing the balance of physical, mental, and emotional aspects of a person’s life and how they affect its quality. This may involve things like a balanced diet, regular exercise, sufficient sleep, stress management, and the use of supplements or natural therapies alongside medications to enhance how the body works on its own. The goal is to maintain optimal health and vitality throughout life, reducing the risk of chronic diseases and improving overall happiness and longevity.
On the other hand, traditional medicine, often referred to as conventional medicine, is the mainstream medical practice that works at addressing current diseased states. It does this primarily through pharmaceuticals, surgery, and other medical procedures with little to no attention being paid to preventative measures.
Traditional medical doctors often view wellness medicine with absolute skepticism, along with the practitioners who employ it. They are cautious about the alternative methods used due to a perceived lack of rigorous scientific evidence supporting their efficacy. However, over recent years, there has been a growing acceptance of the wellness industry within traditional medical landscapes due to its budding popularity among celebrities and influencers worldwide. We caught up with Dr. Ivan Rusilko of Lifestyle Medicine Miami Beach, who has pioneered much of this growing wellness market dating back to 2010. When asked about how traditional physicians claim that the treatments used in the wellness industry lack evidence, Dr. Rusilko snickered.
“First off, let’s take a 30,000-foot view of this ‘evidence-based’ claim. If traditional medicine was truly as ‘evidence-based’ as it promotes, then it wouldn’t be the third leading cause of death in the United States. Yes, fact-check that. The third leading cause of death in the United States is medical errors, which rank higher than respiratory disease and diabetes, averaging around 250,000 deaths per year. That’s terrifying. These errors include surgical complications, misdiagnoses, and incorrect dosages of medications that were prescribed following ‘evidence-based’ science. So to claim that my industry lacks ‘evidence-based’ science, I’d say is a good thing because obviously their evidence seems to be flawed.”
The truth of the matter is that medical studies are often funded by pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology firms, and medical device manufacturers. This leaves one to wonder: When companies fund medical studies, is there a potential for bias in the research outcomes, and what is actually being reported? Researchers may consciously or unconsciously produce results that favor the sponsor’s product or even worse, sponsors could influence the design of the study and the interpretation of results, making evidence-based anything but legitimate.
There is a growing public perception that traditional medicine is not infallible and that errors can and do occur frequently, like with the recall of the COVID-19 vaccines that at one time were marketed as 100% effective and safe, which turned out to not be the case. This has led to increased advocacy for more transparency and accountability in healthcare practices. Patients are becoming more informed, researching their conditions and treatments more frequently, and advocating for more accountability, which puts doctors even more under the microscope. This erosion of trust has driven some patients to explore alternative and complementary medicine options, which they perceive as more holistic and less prone to the types of errors seen in conventional medicine, hence the increase in the wellness industry worldwide.
“Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying all traditional medicine is bad and all wellness medicine good. No, far from that. I have seen the slow pollution of my industry over the years from businessmen and untrained doctors preying on patients with improper techniques and abstract nonsense treatments. So I get the hesitancy; it’s disgusting and dangerous, and it makes the true practitioners and therapies in this field look less credible. But writing off an entire industry because one doesn’t understand it or may disagree with its approach is nonsense. I trained within traditional medicine’s walls and did very well at it, so I know both sides of the spectrum and picked this one, the wellness side, because I believe it to be the truest form of medicine. All the practitioners in this industry did so to see such a mass exodus from traditional practices into the modern form of preventative medicine one has to wonder. Why are so many doctors abandoning conventional medicine for this wellness approach? I believe because it gets results, addresses the entire person and patients look forward to their outcomes.”
Globally, the wellness industry has seen itself grow to an estimated $5.6 trillion, which is larger than the size of Germany’s current GDP. Wellness medicine is literally the size of a current world power with expectations to grow to a staggering $8.5 trillion by 2027, where it will comprise 5.6% of the global GDP. Like it or not, traditional practitioners need to make room for this new form of medicine as it appears it is here to stay.
“I think patients these days, especially post-COVID, are looking for more natural ways to stay healthy and prevent disease rather than waiting to get sick and then trying to formulate a plan. The wellness industry provides just that by promoting healthy lifestyles, diets, and exercise regimens along with new cutting-edge modalities and treatments. Combining common sense things like hydration, diet, sleep, and exercise into programs that augment how one’s biochemistry works is a no-brainer,” says Dr. Rusilko.
He continues, “You don’t need research-based articles for that, even though there are countless numbers of them. The trick is finding the right practitioner who can mash it all together using both traditional and wellness medicine, working in unison, not opposition. I am a fan of traditional medicine when it’s needed. I just wish more doctors used common sense along with their training because a lot of the training one receives as a doctor is anything but that. Pure medicine should be about fixing problems, not just bandaging them.”
Dr. Rusilko has been practicing a version of wellness medicine he calls Lifestyle Medicine in Miami Beach for fourteen years and sees patients for a variety of issues ranging from life-threatening conditions to those wishing to become the healthiest version of themselves. He trained at the largest medical school in the country, the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, and has been featured internationally for his work in the field.
