Healing becomes business
The moment healing becomes a business model, it stops being healing. What emerges instead is a sophisticated extraction system that feeds on human vulnerability while delivering just enough relief to maintain customer retention.
The commodification mechanism
Traditional healing occurred within communities, families, spiritual traditions—contexts where the healer’s wellbeing was inherently connected to the patient’s recovery. The healer had no incentive to prolong suffering.
Modern healing operates under inverted incentives. Recovery threatens revenue. Chronic conditions generate recurring income. The optimal business model is perpetual treatment, not cure.
This isn’t conspiracy—it’s structural inevitability. Once healing enters market logic, it must conform to market demands: growth, scalability, profit maximization.
Manufactured dependency structures
The wellness industry has perfected the art of creating solutions that require more solutions.
Therapy becomes a lifestyle rather than a process with endpoints. Spiritual practices get packaged into subscription services. Meditation apps gamify inner peace, ensuring users never quite achieve the independence they’re supposedly seeking.
Each intervention creates new needs, new inadequacies, new markets. The healed client is a lost client.
Trauma as renewable resource
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in trauma treatment. What was once understood as a temporary disruption requiring community support has been reframed as a permanent identity requiring professional management.
Trauma becomes a brand. Recovery becomes a journey without destination. Healing becomes a continuous consumption process.
The goal shifts from resolving trauma to learning to live with it productively—productively for the industry, that is.
Authenticity theater
The healing business has learned to speak the language of genuine care while operating according to pure extraction logic.
Practitioners use terms like “holding space,” “trauma-informed,” “holistic approach”—all while structuring their services to maximize lifetime customer value.
This isn’t necessarily conscious deception. Many practitioners genuinely believe they’re helping. But individual intentions matter less than systemic pressures.
The spirituality marketplace
Spiritual traditions that developed over millennia get repackaged as weekend workshops. Ancient wisdom becomes intellectual property. Sacred practices become lifestyle products.
The deeper the original tradition, the more profitable its commodification. Buddhism becomes mindfulness apps. Shamanic practices become psychedelic therapy. Indigenous ceremonies become retreat experiences.
What’s lost isn’t just authenticity—it’s the entire cultural ecosystem that made these practices meaningful.
Mental health as growth industry
The expansion of mental health categories serves market needs as much as patient needs. More conditions mean more treatments mean more revenue streams.
Normal human experiences—grief, anxiety, social awkwardness—get pathologized into treatable conditions. The baseline for mental health keeps shifting to encompass more of ordinary life as illness requiring intervention.
This isn’t about whether people suffer—they do. It’s about whether market-based responses to suffering can avoid becoming self-perpetuating systems of dependency.
The optimization trap
Healing becomes subject to efficiency metrics, outcome measurements, scalable methodologies. But healing isn’t optimizable in the way businesses require.
Real healing often involves setbacks, regression, nonlinear progress. It resists standardization and mass production. It requires time, attention, relationship—all things that threaten profit margins.
So the business of healing evolves to prioritize what can be measured and scaled rather than what actually heals.
Community dissolution
Traditional healing happened within relationships—family, community, spiritual groups. These contexts provided meaning, purpose, belonging alongside whatever specific intervention was needed.
Professionalized healing extracts the individual from their social context, treats them in isolation, then returns them to the same environment that may have contributed to their distress.
The social fabric that once supported healing gets replaced by market transactions. Connection becomes a service you purchase rather than a reality you inhabit.
The recovery industry
Even addiction recovery—perhaps the most urgent form of healing—has been captured by business logic.
Treatment centers operate like any other business: marketing, customer acquisition, retention strategies. The goal becomes filling beds rather than emptying them.
Recovery gets extended indefinitely through concepts like “disease management” rather than cure. Relapse becomes not just expected but necessary for business continuity.
Resistance through rejection
None of this means healing is impossible. But it does mean recognizing that healing and business are fundamentally incompatible value systems.
Real healing might require stepping outside market-based solutions entirely. It might mean rebuilding non-commodified relationships, communities, practices.
It definitely means questioning any healing approach that seems designed to create ongoing dependency rather than genuine independence.
The value corruption
When healing becomes business, the value of wellbeing gets subordinated to the value of profit. This isn’t a side effect—it’s the core mechanism.
The question isn’t whether healers are good people with good intentions. The question is whether good intentions can survive intact within systems designed for extraction.
History suggests they cannot.
The wellness industry’s revenue projections tell you everything you need to know about its relationship to actual wellness. Growth requires suffering to remain sufficiently abundant and renewable.