\u201cMedicine is increasingly a retail prospect.\u201d Health journalist Larocca realizes as much when visiting a New York doctor whose clinic now \u201clooks like somewhere you\u2019d go with a group of girlfriends for brunch.\u201d Underscore \u201cgirlfriends,\u201d for Larocca focuses on the health and wellness experiences of women\u2014not just \u201ctoday\u2019s ideal woman\u2026hopped up on her plant-based diet and elaborate adaptogen regimen,\u201d but also the harried workaday woman who aspires to feeling better psychically and physically. It\u2019s a $5.6 trillion industry, Larocca notes, and a vast portion of the till comes from catering to the idea that everyone can become that ideal woman. Some of that desired \u201cwellness\u201d is attended to by the medical industry, which is increasingly bespoke for those who can afford it: Larocca depicts one members-only clinic with a mere five-minute waiting period, 18 times less than the average ER; such concierge medicine speaks to, in one of her nice, bemused turns of phrase, \u201csomething else, something more, some sort of extra health.\u201d Some of that wellness is also the province of specialty groceries. Does anyone remember a time before kale? As it turns out, it\u2019s only been a dozen years or so since kale became groovy. On the matter of grooviness, Larocca is excellent on the New Age aspect of the wellness business, with its mantras and microbiome-supporting organic coffee and mindfulness, which, a longtime practitioner laments, \u201cis usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique.\u201d And of course, much of that wellness centers on pharmaceuticals, on prescription diet drugs along with CBD, microdosing, ayahuasca, and all the rest.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cMedicine is increasingly a retail prospect.\u201d Health journalist Larocca realizes as much when visiting a New York doctor whose clinic now \u201clooks like somewhere you\u2019d go with a group of girlfriends for brunch.\u201d Underscore \u201cgirlfriends,\u201d for Larocca focuses on the health and wellness experiences of women\u2014not just \u201ctoday\u2019s ideal woman\u2026hopped up on her plant-based diet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2891"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2891\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}