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How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time
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About This Book
A groundbreaking cultural, political, and personal exploration of the wellness industry and the ways it's shaping thinking about health and self-care Peleton. Pilates. Biohacking. Colonics. Ashweganda. Today the wellness industry is a $3.7 trillion-dollar behemoth that touches everyone. Journalist Amy Larocca peels back the layers behind the movement and reckons with its promises and profits. How did we get here, and how did the idea of wellness become integrated into people's lives, especially women's? How to be Well takes readers into the communities that swear by their activated-charcoal toothpaste and green-juice enemas, explaining what each of these practices really are—and what the science says. Larocca holds a magnifying glass to alternative medicine and nouveau lifestyle prescriptions, delivering an incisive assessment of how the wellness industry embodies (gendered, class-based, racialized) perceptions of care and self-improvement, and how it preys upon an unshakeable fear of the unknown. She traces the history of how the beauty and fashion industries has peddled snake oil for decades—and why people keep coming back for more.
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Reviews
"Larocca is excellent on the New Age aspect of the wellness business, with its mantras and microbiome-supporting organic coffee and mindfulness."
"The nuanced analysis notes that while wellness culture's appeal stems in part from legitimate concerns about the pharmaceutical industry's insidious influence on mainstream medicine, the supplements hawked by alternative medicine practitioners are usually subject to the same corrupting profit motives."
"The second half of How to Be Well reads like a survey course, cramming the industry's relationship to politics, men and the environment into single chapters when each could fill a whole semester ..."
"Larocca details the impressive variety of forms wellness can take ..."
"Larocca offers interesting portraits of famous people like Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow (a wellness 'she-god') and regular people like herself, admitting the 'embarrassing truth' that her socioeconomic status is most relevant to her health."
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