Abigail Shaw
Writer, communicator, etc.
She came in looking for answers her primary care doctor hadn't been able to give her. Weight gain she couldn't explain. Brain fog that had followed her for years. Bloating that made her feel like a stranger in her own body.
She did everything right, she went to the doctor, followed their advice, tried some prescriptions, and still felt horrible.
So when a health and wellness clinic told her they had a program designed specifically for people like her, she was already sold. When they told her it would cost $3,000 to $5,000 upfront and that her insurance wouldn't cover it, she pulled out her checkbook anyway.
I know this, because I was the person behind the camera recording the “our process” marketing video.
Here's a sample of what the language used to lure her in looks like in the wild:
“Heal and Seal”, “Detox and De-stress”, “Restore and Replenish”, “Cleanse the Blood”, “Our weight-loss program is simple. Detox and lose between half a pound and a pound of fat per day! Just pay the $3k-$5k program fee, and we’ll send you our custom supplements to get you started. *We do not take insurance.”
These are legitimate claims made by a wellness company that’s making millions. I worked for a separate clinic that started offering these gut health and wellness services during my employment, and as the primary marketing person at that time, I was told to push this service over their primary services, because they could make more money per patient this way.
The main company looped us in, and they convinced us to loop patients in, and then patients were encouraged to loop their friends and family in. It was, in a sense, a pyramid scheme.
And as long as I worked there, I had to get as many people in as possible with digital ads, OTT videos, social media posts, in-office messaging and more. At events and in testimonial videos, I watched desperate patients living with obvious pain points fork thousands of dollars over during an economic crisis, at even the chance to feel a little better. Their primary care doctors hadn’t satisfied their need for change with a cut-and-dried answer (a common pain point in modern medicine), so they turned to a wellness company that promised them the world.
And I was complicit.
There is a pattern in health and wellness marketing that extends far beyond this one clinic. At the center of this pattern is language, structure, and a business model so good that too many CEOs have successfully employed it. The rhetoric of healing has become one of the most profitable and least regulated sales tools in America.
The first thing you learn in wellness marketing is that the language has to feel clinical without actually being clinical. This is where you see those phrases mentioned above, like “heal”, “detox”, and “cleanse”. These words are used to create phrases that are expertly engineered to sound like legitimate medicine while existing outside federal and state regulatory structure. It creates the identity of a doctor’s office while operating outside of a medical professional’s accountability.
You know what they say: the best lies hold a bit of truth. Marketers know this.
The program I was asked to market used legitimate science as its entry point. Patients were educated on what a gut microbiome was, how it affected the central nervous system, and how it influenced mood, weight, and energy levels. The studies cited were real. The connection between gut health and overall wellness is genuinely supported by research.
That’s what made the one-size-fits-all solution with a four-figure price tag effective… regardless of the fact that the supplements they would receive had no brand or detailed ingredient labeling (which made it impossible to comparison shop or verify what one was taking) and a single line buried in the fine print on the back page of the booklet that protected the company from any liability.
I was again asked to utilize fear-based messaging (my least favorite kind). Think before-and-after pictures and questions like “You want to meet your grandkids someday, don’t you?” or “You don’t want to lose your self value and destroy your relationships by being overweight, do you?” I’m paraphrasing, but not by much. This product was “Nature’s Ozempic”, after all.
When patients asked why insurance wouldn't cover the program, the answer was rehearsed: "Well, you know how insurance and pharmaceutical companies are." It was an us-versus-them emotional connection designed to make patients feel like they had finally found people on their side. It gets patients to feel like they‘re in cahoots. They had finally found the magic sauce that would cure their weight gain, brain fog, depression, and bloating, etc.
This messaging and rhetoric are designed to do exactly what you see–persuade desperate, scared people that they have no other options.
The supplement and wellness industry in the United States operates under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, a law that requires the FDA to prove a product is unsafe before pulling it from the market rather than requiring companies to prove safety before sale. This single regulatory gap is the foundation on which a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry has been built. Companies can make sweeping claims about what their products support, promote, or enhance as long as they include a disclaimer that the FDA has not evaluated the claim. That disclaimer is almost always in the smallest font on the label, and some of us don’t own reading glasses yet.
The FTC has taken action against wellness companies for deceptive marketing practices repeatedly. The National Advertising Division has issued rulings against supplement brands for unsubstantiated health claims. Multi-level marketing companies built on wellness products (Herbalife, AdvoCare, and probs others) have faced federal settlements for making medical claims their products couldn't support while charging participants thousands of dollars to sell them. This business model I was working in was an industry pattern, and we were all expected to go along with it because it was our job.
And when you have bills to pay, you do that job.
I’ve seen and heard “Take control of your health, with XYZ brand name!” more times than I can count on one hand. I mean, who in America doesn’t want to take control of their health? To feel some hope that they’re going to be okay physically, mentally and financially? In 2025, Gallup discovered that only 44% of Americans are happy with their healthcare. That means more than half of Americans are unhappy with the quality of their care. 84% are dissatisfied with the cost of U.S. healthcare. 61% say navigating the U.S healthcare is a hassle, and 63% report that it’s stressful to even try. Of course, people want some sense of control over their healthcare and wellbeing.
People are desperate.
And when people are desperate, especially about something as important as their health, there will always be people and companies that take advantage. The ones looking to mine you for gold use the same rhetoric as the legit ones. They prey on your fears to get you in the door and your name at the bottom of the check. They hire entire marketing teams to create this messaging and to tweak it so that no one knows they’re being marketed to.
I felt like Plutarch Heavensbee in the Hunger Games, doing whatever I was told to sell an idea to the public.
The people who were signing up for these gut health and wellness programs were not overly wealthy people who just happened to have thousands lying around. They were scared. They were people who had spent years in and out of doctors’ offices. They were moms who wanted to keep up with their kids, and individuals who wanted to feel good in their bodies again.
Their desperation, their willingness to turn to a new solution outside of the regulated system, is now a revenue stream for those willing to exploit it.
American healthcare created this desperation itself, what with its fragmented coverage, its fifteen-minute appointments, its chronic underfunding of research on women's health and chronic illness, and the conditions that don't have a clean pharmaceutical answer.
The wellness industry found the gap and moved in. And because the regulatory structure allows it, and because the language is carefully constructed to stay just inside the legal line, most of what happens in that space is entirely lawful.
And as we know, lawful is not the same as ethical.
I don’t believe that all alternative medicine is a scam. I literally have a certification in Medicinal Plants and drink my herbal teas every single day. Combined and integrated approaches to health have real value. There are people in the health and wellness space doing real good and using evidence-based research to support their claims.
The thing to keep in mind is that the businesses that don’t care and aren’t doing a whole lot of good know how to use the same language as those who are making a difference.
If you know what to look for, and you look very closely, you can see which product contradicts its own legitimacy.
But that cautiousness doesn’t appeal to the general public, not when they’re desperate. Not when they’re now picturing their death before they ever get to meet their grandkids. And it certainly doesn’t help that we don’t educate people on how to identify these red flags. Because why would said businesses want to teach you? Then they wouldn’t be able to get your money as easily.
This model serves a very small group of people. It serves the top owners and boards of these health and wellness organizations at the expense of every desperate and scared person in America who has a health issue of one kind or another.
Thousands of dollars upfront for a gut health intervention prices out exactly the people most likely to need affordable healthcare solutions and who are just desperate enough to try anything. The wellness industry rhetoric of empowerment and taking control of your health obscures the fact that access is entirely contingent on disposable income and the ability to discern which “medical” providers are reliable.
I can still see the face of the woman in our promo video. So full of hope. Just like the ones who came after her. People who deserved real answers and got an enticingly packaged revenue strategy instead, at the exact moment they were most scared and most willing to believe someone finally had one.
Healthcare rhetoric becoming a revenue stream isn't new. But it keeps working because we keep letting it. And somewhere right now, someone is pulling out their checkbook for the quick fix they’ve always wanted.
Some pointers from an ex-health care and wellness marketer to avoid the scammy products and packages. These don’t automatically mean something is for sure bad news, but it does highlight some questions to ask:
I write a lil something like this usually once or twice a month. Drop your email, and I'll send it straight to you. No newsletter format, no extra spam emails. Just the essay. (Mom this is for you.)
