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Jos Verbeek, Wellness: a useful concept but highjacked by commerce, Occupational Medicine, Volume 69, Issue 4, June 2019, Pages 233–234, https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqz060
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Last year, the New York Times summarized the results of a randomized controlled study and concluded that wellness programmes offered to employees by employers do not work well [1,2]. I would like to explain what the implications of this study are.
Let’s first look at wellness. The oldest reference in PubMed referring to wellness is over 60 years old but still makes for an interesting read [3]. The World Health Organization (WHO) was just established and had defined health as not merely the absence of disease but ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’ [4]. Dunn called this ‘positive health’ or ‘wellness’ to better reflect that this was the opposite of ‘illness’ [3]. Instead of only abating illness, efforts should be directed towards increasing wellness. To achieve greater wellness, health has to be promoted in persons ‘at very low levels of wellness’. Dunn thus pictured over 60 years ago what is a reality nowadays, where health promotion focusses on lowering cholesterol levels, blood pressure, body weight or stress-scores.
