The Wellness Industry Is Making Billions Selling Practices It Once Called Witchcraft
Updated: Aug 26
When a witch does it, it’s superstition. When a wellness company does it, it’s “nervous-system regulation.” When traditional practitioners work with herbs, ritual, breath, meditation, spirituality or energy, their practices can be dismissed as pseudoscience, superstition or alternative medicine. Put similar ideas into minimalist packaging, add words like somatic healing, biohacking, subconscious reprogramming, mindfulness and holistic wellness, and suddenly there is a product, certification, retreat or coaching program attached to it. Same ritual. New vocabulary. Different person getting paid.
That doesn’t mean every wellness practice was stolen from witches. It doesn’t mean scientific research into traditional practices is appropriation, and it certainly doesn’t mean every traditional remedy works simply because it is old. The truth is more complicated—and far more interesting. The modern wellness industry has become extraordinarily good at taking practices with deep roots in religious, Indigenous, folk and traditional cultures, separating some of them from their original spiritual frameworks, translating them into the language of modern health and self-improvement, and selling them to an entirely different market. Breathing practices become “nervous-system regulation.” Meditation becomes a productivity technique. Herbal traditions become premium botanical supplements. Ritual gets repackaged as manifestation. Spiritual practices become expensive wellness experiences. Ancient practices are discussed through the language of neuroscience, optimization and performance. Sometimes that transformation produces legitimate scientific discoveries. Sometimes it makes useful practices accessible to people who otherwise would never encounter them. But sometimes the culture disappears while the product survives.
Take breath work. Pranayama is not simply “breathing exercises.” It exists within centuries-old Indian yogic traditions containing religious, philosophical and spiritual dimensions. Modern researchers are perfectly entitled to investigate what controlled breathing does to the human body. Scientific study can help determine which effects are real, which are exaggerated and which require more evidence. But science studying an old practice is not the same thing as science inventing that practice. That distinction matters.
The same problem becomes even more complicated with traditional herbal knowledge. Human communities have accumulated knowledge about plants for thousands of years. Indigenous peoples, traditional healers, herbalists, midwives, root workers and folk practitioners preserved knowledge through families, apprenticeships, oral traditions and communities long before modern pharmaceutical laboratories existed. Modern medicine can study that knowledge. Researchers can isolate compounds, test them, reject ineffective treatments and potentially develop genuinely new medicines from what they discover. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The ethical question is what happens when commercially valuable knowledge travels in only one direction.
A community can preserve knowledge for generations. Someone outside that community identifies something commercially useful. A company has the capital, laboratories, lawyers, branding and distribution network necessary to transform an idea into a marketable product. The corporation may be able to obtain intellectual-property protection for a genuinely novel invention, while the community whose collective knowledge contributed to that discovery may not fit comfortably within conventional systems built around identifiable inventors and discrete inventions. This isn't merely an argument happening on social media. The World Intellectual Property Organization has spent years addressing the relationship between intellectual property, genetic resources and traditional knowledge. In 2024, WIPO member states adopted a treaty concerning intellectual property, genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge, including provisions concerning Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Think about what that means. The international intellectual-property system itself recognizes that the relationship between patents, genetic resources and traditional knowledge is complicated enough to require an international legal framework. Yet online wellness culture frequently talks about “ancient wisdom” as though that wisdom simply appeared from nowhere. That is where commercialization can cross into cultural erasure.
Then there is the strange legal line separating wellness from medicine. Contrary to some viral claims, traditional practitioners are not universally banned from practicing herbalism, spirituality or folk healing simply because they lack a government-approved certificate. American licensing laws vary by state and profession, and what someone claims to be doing matters enormously. Calling something spiritual guidance is different from representing yourself as a licensed psychotherapist. Selling a dietary supplement is different from selling a product while claiming that it cures a disease. Providing a traditional ritual is different from diagnosing a medical condition. Those distinctions can determine whether an activity falls into a regulated profession.
Corporations have learned to navigate that vocabulary extremely well. The FDA permits dietary supplements to carry certain “structure/function” claims concerning how an ingredient may support normal structures or functions of the body, subject to federal requirements, without those claims being treated the same way as claims that a product diagnoses, treats, cures or prevents disease. The Federal Trade Commission separately requires marketers to adequately substantiate objective health claims. These rules are important consumer protections, but they also demonstrate something fascinating about the modern wellness economy: language has power.
There is an enormous difference between saying a product “cures anxiety” and marketing something around general well-being or supporting normal bodily functions. There is a difference between treating a psychiatric disorder and selling wellness coaching. There is a difference between practicing medicine and providing a spiritual service. The modern wellness entrepreneur isn't merely selling products; they are also selling vocabulary, and vocabulary can dramatically influence whether consumers perceive something as primitive or sophisticated, mystical or clinical, suspicious or respectable.
That is why the transformation of traditional practices deserves more scrutiny. Words like wellness, mindfulness, breath work, manifestation, somatic healing, nervous-system regulation, holistic health, plant medicine, biohacking, energy healing, traditional healing, herbalism and alternative medicine now exist inside an enormous commercial marketplace. Consumers should start asking a simple question whenever the newest “ancient secret” appears on their feed: Where did this actually come from? Who practiced it before it became profitable? Who preserved the knowledge? What did the original practice actually mean? What evidence supports the modern health claims? Who owns the company selling it? And perhaps most importantly, who is getting paid?
Cultural appropriation isn't simply using something that originated in another culture. Cultures have always exchanged knowledge. Medicine has always learned from previous generations, and scientific research should investigate traditional practices when there is reason to believe they could benefit people. The problem is extraction without acknowledgment. It is taking the product while discarding the people. It is stripping away the history until something becomes culturally comfortable enough to sell.
There is a particularly bitter historical contradiction underneath all of this. Many spiritual and traditional practices have, at different times and places, been suppressed, stigmatized or dismissed as primitive, pagan, irrational or dangerous. Indigenous spiritual traditions experienced especially severe disruption through colonization and government assimilation policies. Now Western consumers actively seek “ancient wisdom,” but ancient wisdom apparently becomes much easier to sell when consumers don't have to confront the people, religions, histories or cultures that made it ancient.
That should bother witches, herbalists and traditional practitioners. It should matter to Indigenous communities whose knowledge is commercialized without appropriate recognition or benefit. It should matter to scientists who care about accurately documenting the origins of knowledge. And it should matter to ordinary consumers who don't want spirituality, science or cultural identity reduced to another marketing strategy.
None of this requires rejecting modern medicine or science. Quite the opposite. Science gives us tools for determining whether health claims actually work. The FDA and FTC provide important protections against misleading or unsupported medical claims. Traditional knowledge should not receive an exemption from evidence when someone's health is at stake, and corporations shouldn't receive one either. We can believe in evidence-based medicine while demanding historical honesty. We can scientifically study meditation without pretending meditation was invented in a laboratory. We can research medicinal plants without pretending nobody knew anything about those plants before researchers arrived. We can practice breath work while acknowledging the cultures and traditions that developed sophisticated breathing systems centuries before TikTok. We can protect consumers without treating every traditional practitioner as ignorant, and we can innovate without erasing the people whose knowledge helped make that innovation possible.
That isn't anti-science. It is intellectually honest. The wellness industry didn't invent humanity's desire to heal. It didn't invent ritual, herbs, meditation, our fascination with altered states, spirituality, breath, nature or the relationship between mind and body. What modern wellness has perfected is something different: the ability to package those desires for a consumer economy.
So the next time an influencer introduces an “ancient practice” using a brand-new trademarked name, or a luxury wellness company promises to reconnect you with wisdom humans supposedly forgot, don't immediately dismiss it—but don't immediately buy it either. Ask where it came from. Ask what the evidence actually says. Ask whose culture carried it. Ask whether those people are being acknowledged. Ask who stands to make money when something once dismissed as superstition suddenly becomes wellness.
Because sometimes innovation really is innovation. Sometimes science really does discover something new. And sometimes the newest breakthrough on your feed is something humanity has been doing for centuries—with better packaging, better marketing and a much higher price tag. Same knowledge. New vocabulary. Better packaging. Different person getting paid.
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