Although the Oxford English Dictionary traces well-being (that is, the opposite of illness) to the 1650s, the history of the welfare movement really begins in the 1950s. Wellness is a modern word with ancient roots. As a modern concept, wellness has gained ground since the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when the writings and leadership of an informal network of physicians and thinkers in the United States greatly shaped the way we conceptualize and talk about wellness today. Wellness is a particularly broad term, but it is often used by promoters of unproven medical therapies, such as Food Babe or Goop.
The Global Wellness Institute (GWI) provides valuable research and resources at no cost, driving collaboration and innovation in the wellness industry. John Travis, influenced by Dunn, opens the world's first wellness center in California and publishes a 12-dimensional wellness assessment tool, The Wellness Inventory (197) and The Wellness Workbook (197), both in use today. Once associated with the New Age utopian subcultures of places like Marin County and Santa Fe, wellness has become widespread. Bill Hettler of the USWP hosts the National Welfare Institute and the first National Welfare Conference.
There are now wellness consultants, for those who can afford the privilege of self-improvement, wellness vacations aboard holistic cruises, and even wellness providers for cats and dogs. Discrimination against people with disabilities in corporate wellness programs was one of the many reasons behind the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The aesthetic ideal of the lean and muscular body may derive from Greek antiquity, but it was the reformers of life who turned the well-groomed physique into a virtue, explains Hau. The philosophies embodied in these 19th century systems, that a healthy body is a product of a healthy mind and spirit, are now considered precursors of current and thriving wellness and self-help movements.
A wellness industry was born, whose embellishments included healthy food and beverages, the right attire, and retreats to the sanatorium, the exclusive health spa that was dissected into the pages of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP), based on Travis materials, establishes the first wellness center on the college campus, with campus wellness centers spreading across the U. Jennifer Gunter has criticized what she sees as promoting overdiagnosis by the wellness community. Travis, Ardell, Hettler and their associates were responsible for creating the world's first wellness center, developing the first wellness center on the college campus, and establishing the National Welfare Institute and the National Wellness Conference in the U.
Approaches that evolved from TCM, such as acupuncture, herbal medicine, qi gong and tai chi, have become basic and modern approaches to wellness, and even Western medicine. The culture of wellness has promised success for more than a century, success in the fight for survival through body control and self-discipline.
