The Truth About Lies by Aja Raden

Author:Aja Raden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Big Wellness

But there’s always backlash or, at least, what looks like backlash: at the same time that most of the country was high as a kite, an increasingly large, generally wealthy demographic had become obsessed with their own health and “wellness.” Don’t misunderstand: they were just as crazy, and just as swayed by advertising and groupthink as the drug-addled portion of the country. In the very beginning it was just spa towns, bathing, and “taking the waters,” but it got so weird, so fast. And ground zero for this new madness was Battle Creek Sanitarium, a “health reform institute” started by Dr. John Kellogg.

Dr. Kellogg—yes, the guy who invented your cereal—was kind of the Gwyneth Paltrow of his day, but somehow scarier. He was a real doctor (unlike, say, Dr. Bailey of Radithor fame), but you wouldn’t know it, the way he eschewed narcotics, alcohol, and lead paint chips. Instead, our celebrity wellness doctor went 180 degrees the other way. He was obsessed with purity and “clean” living. Kellogg was an adamant vegetarian (when he ate at all) and deliberately celibate over the course of his forty-year marriage.

Battle Creek Sanitarium was the place to go—if you could get in. At the height of the wellness movement, the Battle Creek Sanitarium wait list included Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, and Sojourner Truth—for such forward-thinking treatments as electric-light baths, sinusoidal-current therapy, continuous bathing, fifteen-quart enemas, and my favorite: masturbation cures. The electric-light bathing didn’t involve bathing so much as it did getting in a wooden casket lined with lightbulbs to cure insomnia and depression. Which is marginally less insane than it sounds when you consider that both are treated with “light therapy” today. Just not locked in a box. Continuous bathing actually was bathing (you know, in water) but for days, weeks, or months at a time—definitely not to be combined with sinusoidal-current therapy, which involved applying electrical currents of various strengths directly to the naked body, via a device Dr. Kellogg cobbled together from old phone parts. Kellogg believed that sinusoidal-current therapy could treat lead poisoning, obesity, and even vision problems if applied directly to the eyeballs.

The fifteen-quart enemas are exactly what they sound like, but worse: it was fifteen quarts per minute, as “more people need[ed] washing out than any other remedy,” according to Dr. Kellogg. There were violently vibrating wooden chairs to “stimulate the bowels,” beating and slapping machines, and intensely weird rules about food, sleep, exercise, and unclean thoughts. Masturbation cures involved, among other things, mutilation. So you can see how all this “wellness” wasn’t really any healthier than buying an eight ball from the Sears, Roebuck catalog.

Battle Creek Sanitarium and the wellness movement marked the beginning of what would just get worse, if not weirder, and would be more aggressively marketed as the “Wellness Industry.” The wellness movement began in an era that had touted the health benefits of alcohol for infants, random poisons and hardest of drugs for everyone and then flipped and brought us everything from medical cleanses to yogurt enemas to expensive health oriented staycations.

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