Healing Is Being Sold Everywhere Right Now

Not Every Practitioner in Your Instagram Feed Is There to Help You

If you have been sick long enough, you know this moment. It comes somewhere after the sixth or seventh appointment where nothing new was found, nothing new was offered, and you left with the same instructions you came in with. You go home, you open your phone, and the algorithm (which has been paying very close attention) is ready for you. Somewhere between the nineteenth Instagram post and the third YouTube rabbit hole, something starts to sound like it might actually help. That moment has nothing to do with your intelligence and everything to do with what happens when a system fails people loudly and repeatedly, and an industry steps in to fill the gap. Not everything in that industry is trying to harm you. Some of it is evidence-informed, carefully delivered, and genuinely helpful, but the vocabulary is the same, the aesthetics are the same, and the before and after stories are the same. And when you are sick enough, the line between hope and exploitation gets very hard to see.

We are not only going to dissect this problem today, we’re going to cut right through the bullshit too.

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Why chronic illness is unfortunately a perfect target market

We didn’t get here overnight, so how did it all happen? This is a perfect storm that has been brewing for a long time, and it involves the multifactorial failures of the traditional healthcare system combined with a cultural shift toward personalization and distrust of institutions. To understand the dark side of the wellness industry space, and why it is able to take advantage of the chronic illness space, we have to understand what people are running from before we can understand what they are running towards.

The problem with healthcare

The healthcare system is not failing. It is running like a well-oiled machine. The healthcare system is operating exactly as it was designed, and that is to line the pockets of the insurance companies who run it. It should come as no surprise that it is not designed to serve the people. A cure is bad for business. A handful of corporations now control every layer of your healthcare from the insurance, the physician, the pharmacy, to the price of your medication. At every layer, it is the same company manipulating access and the cost of your care. The manipulation from these companies is so deep that your insurance company is determining which tests are approved, which treatments are covered, how many visits you are allowed, and what the acceptable clinical pathway looks like for your condition even before the clinician has finished evaluating you.

Just to paint a picture of how little autonomy clinicians have in providing the best patient care possible, check this out: A 2024 report from the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations found that three major commercial insurers denied prior authorization requests at rates between 22-34% depending on the plan. The most troubling information is that the insurance companies know that the overwhelming majority of denials are never appealed. Patients don’t have the energy. Clinicians don’t have the bandwidth, and the math works in the insurer’s favor every time. It’s a gamble they are willing to take for profit.

Clinicians are fed up

An increasing number of physical therapists, physicians, dietitians, and other practitioners are leaving insurance-based practice. The lack of autonomy was one of the number one reasons I left. Towards the end of working in the traditional healthcare system, I felt like more of a glorified data collector as opposed to an independent clinician with skills I spent years developing. It was getting harder and harder to provide the individualized care and attention truly needed when insurance companies were demanding that I perform certain tests during my evaluation…tests that were often unwarranted and didn’t provide any meaningful information on how to best help the person. The documentation requirements kept expanding, and it was too much to keep up with. My clinical decision and recommendations would get overridden by what the insurance would approve, and it made my job a million times harder to meet their unrealistic demands.

We’re not leaving the traditional system to exploit patients. We’re leaving to reclaim the ability to make a difference and treat patients without anyone breathing down our neck. We want to use our clinical decision making skills to actually make a difference in your life. We want to have the time to listen to you without being rushed or bombarded with seeing multiple patients simultaneously. We have been working in an environment where reimbursement rates have decreased over time and the overhead to provide care has gone up. As a result, the only solution to low reimbursement rates is a higher patient volume, shorter appointments, and abbreviated care.

This is the context in which cash-based practices have grown, and I want to make sure I say this loud and clear:

A cash-based clinician is not automatically a grifter.

In many cases, going outside of insurance is what allows a clinician to spend 60 minutes with you instead of 20. It allows the clinician to build a treatment plan around your unique and individual needs instead of your diagnostic code, and to continue working with you past the visit limit your insurance would have imposed. When it comes to chronic conditions like Long COVID, that autonomy is often not a luxury, but rather a clinical necessity.

I also realize that cash-based care is not accessible to everyone. This is another real and serious problem that deserves its own conversation, but the existence of a cash-based service does not make someone a predator. Viewing the two things as one in the same does a disservice to the clinicians who left insurance precisely because they refused to compromise the care they seek to deliver.

The MAHA Effect

Ever since Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) started gaining traction in 2024, I have been worried about the moment it creeps into the chronic illness space. Over the past two years, we have been experiencing a turbocharged cultural shift that was already underway. On the surface, MAHA is appealing: limit exposure to environmental toxins, exercise regularly, and eat whole foods while limiting ultra-processed foods. Heck yeah! That sounds awesome, and I am all for those things. In reality, the MAHA actions, underlying messaging, and policies don’t actually match the surface-level initiatives. Unfortunately, I believe we are now at the tipping point of it having the upper hand influence on American health…and not in a good way.

Beneath the surface

Beneath the surface, MAHA believes that a chronic condition is a result of poor lifestyle choices, and not because of socioeconomic factors, geographic location, or genetics. They claim that chronic disease is 100% preventable, which is partially true. Most chronic diseases can be prevented under the right circumstances. These circumstances include favorable social determinants of health such as economic stability, good education, access to preventative care, safe communities, clean air, clean water, and affordable food. However, they are suggesting that your entire health rests solely on your personal choices and what you did or didn’t do to “optimize it”. They do not acknowledge the impact of factors outside your control. So, what does optimizing health mean to them? It means buying organic, taking supplements, detox protocols, expensive water filtration systems, and air purification systems…choices that are luxuries to many people. In other words, they believe that if you get a chronic disease then it is because of the choices you made and not the factors out of your control.

Sowing Distrust

It’s not just about personal choice to optimize health. The movement pushes distrust in BigPharma, which BigPharma has definitely earned some of this mistrust, but not to the level of abandoning it entirely (as they suggest). While BigPharma is absolutely to blame for the opioid epidemic and the insane costs of prescription drug prices, it provides a lot of essential treatments. Inhalers for people with asthma are life changing. Insulin for some diabetics is non-negotiable. Epi Pens are lifesaving. What happens with distrust once it is activated, is that it often doesn’t stay contained to its legitimate targets. It spreads to innocent targets. In this case, the peripheral targets include all scientific and medical establishments. Unfortunately, MAHA is amplifying and exploiting some very real skepticism in these establishments. The history of medicine is not innocent. It includes real failures, real conflicts of interest, and real harm done to real patients, particularly those who were already marginalized. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is one of the most famous examples of unethical behavior in American medicine resulting in mistrust, and there are many more examples like this. The distrust is already there, and the MAHA messaging advances and exploits it by pushing for autonomy from the medical establishment. When people are constantly hearing that they should “do their own research”, treat conditions “naturally”, approach things “holistically”, and make choices that “optimize health”, it shifts the role of expert from the clinician to the patient. On the surface, these buzz words sound harmless and innocent, but this is a HUGE problem because less than 12% of Americans possess proficient health literacy skills. What this means is that roughly 12% of Americans have the ability to interpret health-related information to truly make an educated and informed decision on their own.

The repeated exposure to this narrative erodes trust in heavily regulated relationships and treatments while opening the door for unregulated products, unqualified or under-qualified individuals, and profit-seeking solutions without any regulation or accountability.

A Word of Caution That I Mean Sincerely

Please do not abandon your relationship with a primary care provider. Do not use Google or any form of AI to diagnose or manage your health. I say this as someone who has watched the insurance system fail Long COVID patients repeatedly, as someone who operates outside of insurance myself, and as someone who has deep respect for the legitimate critiques of institutional medicine (some of which I have criticized myself). I am the first to say the system sucks, and also the first to tell you how to use it to your advantage. Do not abandon it!

Your primary care doctor is your safety net for the things that wellness cannot catch…drug interactions, contraindications, red flag symptoms that need further testing, lab abnormalities that need follow-up, early cancer screenings, and so much more. The over-the-counter supplement market is less regulated than most people realize. Just because it is over the counter doesn’t mean it is safe. Supplements are not required to go through the FDA for approval before they hit the market. It is up to the manufacturer to ensure they are safe. The lack in regulation has resulted in supplements falsely advertising the percentage of ingredients, containing hidden ingredients (heavy metals, mold, or pesticides), including harmful pharmaceutical ingredients, or even adding banned ingredients. Additionally, the risk for polypharmacy (dangerous interactions between multiple substances whether prescription or supplement-based) is real and underappreciated. There are supplements being recommended in Long COVID communities right now that interact with common medications in ways that can cause harm. Let’s take nattokinase or lumbrokinase for example. Lumbrokinase is over the counter and being researched for Long COVID right now. It is a natural blood thinner. There are certain individuals who should not be taking blood thinners because of the risk of spontaneous bleeding. The average person may not be able to discern these factors, but your doctor can. There are also protocols being sold that are contraindicated for people with specific cardiac or autoimmune presentations. Without a clinician who knows your full picture, you are navigating that risk alone.

When you look beyond the system that prioritizes profits over patients, there are still incredible clinicians within the system. As much as I dislike how the system is operating against us, gaslighting patients with Long COVID, and leaving many people behind; the goal is to build a team that includes both the medical system and whatever additional evidence-informed support your condition actually requires. The goal is NOT to choose between the medical system and everything outside of it. Going outside of the traditional system should never outright replace it, and anyone telling you it does is someone to be cautious of. Personally, I will not work with anyone unless they have a medical team. It truly takes a village, and having the best of both worlds can make a difference.

The Wellness Industry

Let’s start with some context because the wellness industry is not inherently a villain.

The global wellness economy is currently valued at approximately $6.3 trillion dollars, according to the Global Wellness Institute's 2024 report. To put that in perspective, it is larger than the global pharmaceutical industry. It encompasses everything from fitness and nutrition to mental health, traditional medicine, workplace wellness, and spa and beauty. It has been growing at a rate that has outpaced virtually every other consumer sector for the past decade. The roots of modern wellness movement are not cynical. They grew out of something legitimate, which is a growing body of evidence that lifestyle factors including nutrition, movement, sleep, stress management, and social connection have profound effects on longevity and long term health outcomes. They grew out of a population that was increasingly frustrated with a healthcare model built around treating disease after it arrived rather than preventing it from arriving in the first place. The desire to be an active participant in your own health rather than a passive recipient of a twelve minute appointment is understandable and arguably necessary. Somewhere along the way (accelerated by social media, the influencer economy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a growing institutional distrust of conventional medicine) the wellness industry’s edges got significantly darker. The fringe has slowly become more mainstream.

The barrier to entry has dropped significantly. Anyone with a ring light, a convincing story and a payment processor could open up shop as a health authority. Unlike conventional medicine, there is nothing to hold them accountable. No certification required. No licensure mandates. No ethics board. No continuing education requirements unlike my fellow physical therapists, physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals. To be honest, it’s insulting and infuriating.

What the grift actually looks like

The wellness grift in the chronic illness space is not always obvious. It is rarely a person twirling a mustache and cackling behind a ring light. More often, it is sophisticated, emotionally intelligent, visually polished, and genuinely difficult to distinguish from legitimate support. It is even harder to tell when you are in the thick of being sick and might be experiencing brain fog or other cognitive changes. What makes it effective is not that it looks fake. It is that it looks exactly like what you have been hoping to find…progress, healing, recovery.

Here are the archetypes worth acknowledging.

The Recovered Influencer
This is perhaps the most common and the most compelling. Someone had Long COVID. They got better and now they are sharing, and sometimes selling, the exact protocol they used to recover, with the implication that it will work for you too.

Recovery stories are real. People do improve. You should follow accounts with recovery stories. The impulse to share what helped you is genuinely human and often well-intentioned. The problem is not the story. The problem is how it is applied.

Long COVID has multiple phenotypes and multiple drivers. When someone recovers and attributes that recovery to a specific supplement stack, a nervous system protocol, or a dietary intervention, they may be right, but only for their unique circumstance. They may also be experiencing improvement driven by something else entirely that wasn’t tracked. Unfortunately, the protocol gets the credit and the push that it can apply to everyone with Long COVID, and this is not the case. The person whose main driver is a reactivation of Epstein-Barr Virus is not going to recover from the same protocol that helped someone with gut dysbiosis.

What a recovered influencer cannot tell you is whether what worked for their phenotype will work for yours. Recovering is wonderful. There is plenty of knowledge and wisdom that comes from being in the trenches and making it to the other side. However, it does not replace years of education and training in the medical field. Unless this person also has some type of health professional license or legitimate certification, this is a no. A recovery story is data of one person. It is not a clinical trial that can be generalized to many.

The Credentialed-Adjacent Practitioner
This archetype is harder to spot because the vocabulary is often correct. They speak fluently about mitochondrial dysfunction, vagus nerve activation, mast cell activation, and nervous system dysregulation. They have certifications like functional medicine health coaching, integrative nutrition health coaching, breathwork facilitation, trauma-informed somatic practice. The titles sound clinical. The language sounds clinical, but unless it’s backed up with a clinical degree it should be cautiously scrutinized.

The question worth asking is: what does this credential actually mean, who granted it, and what does it require to maintain? A weekend certification and a three-year accredited clinical degree are not the same thing. In an online environment where everyone has a title and a logo, those distinctions get overlooked quickly. This does not mean that non-licensed practitioners have nothing to offer. There are some incredible practitioners. They absolutely have a role and a place, but they should be an adjunct to the team. They should be a part of the village, and not the only one helping you with your health. When a complex condition like Long COVID runs the risk of profound harm from a PEM crash, a contraindicated supplement, or a protocol that pushes when it should be pulling back, the bar for scrutiny should be higher and not lower.

It’s okay to work with these people as long as they have been vetted and you have a trusted practitioner on your team who is helping you manage drug interactions as well as mitigating PEM.

The Supplement Stack
This version is the one that drives me up a wall. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the company or person who has come up with the perfect blend of ingredients that “support mitochondrial health” or “promotes cellular repair” without a single peer-reviewed citation. There tends to be enough real science to make the leap feel smaller than it is. They may take a legitimate study about one of the ingredients in the proprietary blend and use that as a justification for an $89 per month supplement subscription. What you don’t know is if that ingredient is actually in there, what percentage of it is active, and what else is hidden in the supplement.

The supplement industry in the United States operates with significantly less regulatory oversight than pharmaceutical drugs. Supplements do not need to prove efficacy before going to market. They do not need to prove safety at the doses being recommended. And the people recommending them are frequently earning a commission on every sale, a conflict of interest that is not always disclosed.

This does not mean all supplements are useless. Some have genuine emerging evidence behind them in the context of Long COVID. But there is a meaningful difference between a clinician reviewing the literature and thoughtfully discussing a supplement as one piece of a broader strategy, and an influencer dropping an affiliate link in their bio for a product their sponsor sent them.

The One-Track Method
Similar to the recovered influencer, this person offers one single method or one single protocol for recovery to any person with Long COVID. There isn’t any discrimination between whether it helps the person with dysautonomia, the person with severe ME/CFS, or the person whose Long COVID is driven by viral persistence vs. microclotting. They tend to subscribe to one theory as the root cause to Long COVID. A lot of their messaging will be aimed at convincing you that microclotting, for example, is the root cause of your problems. They’ll have legitimate research to back it up. Here’s the thing, microclotting is one cause to Long COVID, but it isn’t everyone’s. A treatment protocol of natural blood thinners and clot busting methods could be extremely dangerous to some people. If there is one thing I know that the medical community takes seriously it is the risk of spontaneous bleeding and the risk of clotting. It is not something to mess around with. The truth is that there are at least seven different underlying pathophysiological mechanisms to Long COVID. Again, subsribing to one protocol without consideration of your unique circumstance or presentation is not only reckless…it’s dangerous. Therefore, one single protocol isn’t going to “cure” everyone. On a side note, anyone promising a cure is an immediate red flag. At this time, nobody can promise a cure when there are too many uncertainties and factors out of our control. Recovery is possible, but a cure cannot be guaranteed.

How to tell the difference: The Field Guide for Red Flags

​​This is the part to save. These are not guarantees of harm, but they are signals worth pausing on:

→ No verifiable clinical credentials or licensure in a relevant field. Look for credentials like MD, DO, DPT, DC, OT/R, RD.
→ Recovery promises without any acknowledgment of phenotype variability or individual differences
→ Protocols that make no mention of post-exertional malaise or energy envelope management
→ Testimonials presented as primary evidence in place of peer-reviewed research
→ Affiliate links on supplement recommendations without disclosed conflicts of interest
→ One-size-fits-all framing for a disease the research has confirmed has multiple subtypes
→ No guidance on when to escalate to additional medical support
→ Active discouragement of conventional medicine or pharmaceutical treatment
→ Claims that their approach works for everyone, or that lack of progress means you aren’t trying hard enough
→ No transparency about what is unknown or what the evidence actually shows

What legitimate support looks like

Legitimate support is not flashy. It does not promise recovery. It does not ask you to abandon your medical team or replace your physician with a protocol. Here is what it does do:

It comes from someone whose credentials are verifiable, relevant to the condition being treated, and maintained through ongoing continuing education in an evolving field. It is built on a working knowledge of the peer-reviewed literature, and not cherry-picked studies, but an honest accounting of what the evidence shows including its limitations.

It accounts for post-exertional malaise as a non-negotiable clinical reality. Any program, practitioner, or protocol that does not have a clear and specific framework for managing energy expenditure and preventing crashes is not built for Long COVID, regardless of what it claims.

It acknowledges complexity. It does not tell you that your recovery will look like someone else’s, because it cannot. It adapts to you…your phenotype, your baseline, your capacity on any given week rather than asking you to adapt to it.

It is transparent about what is not known. In a field this young and this complex, intellectual honesty is a clinical virtue. Anyone presenting certainty they do not have is a signal.

It tells you when it is not enough. Legitimate support includes clear escalation pathways. It includes guidance on when symptoms warrant medical attention, when a referral is appropriate, and when the support being offered has reached its limit. No single practitioner or program is the whole answer for a condition this complex, and the ones worth trusting know that.

And finally, it does not shame you for not getting better fast enough. Progress in Long COVID is nonlinear, variable, and deeply individual. A program or practitioner that attributes your lack of improvement to your effort rather than to the complexity of the illness is not a program or practitioner built on evidence.

Before You Go

If you have spent money on something that didn’t work, I want to say something to you directly.

You are not foolish. You are not weak. You are not the cautionary tale.

You are someone who was sick, who was not being adequately helped by the systems that were supposed to help you, and who made a reasonable decision with the information and the desperation you had at the time. That is what happens when a gap exists and an industry rushes in to fill it before the science has caught up.

What I want you to walk away with is not cynicism. Cynicism toward the wellness space is as dangerous as uncritical trust in it, because it can close the door on support that is legitimate, evidence-informed, and genuinely helpful. There are practitioners operating outside of insurance who are doing some of the most careful, rigorous, patient-centered work in this field. There is emerging science behind pacing, nervous system regulation, anti-inflammatory nutrition, and structured rehabilitation that is real and replicable and worth engaging with.

The goal is discernment. This is the ability to look at something and ask: who is this person, what do they actually know, what does the evidence actually say, and what are they promising me? Those questions are not unfriendly. They are the questions that protect you.

And here is the thing that I keep coming back to, the thing that has defined my work in this field since 2020: you deserve care that matches the complexity of what you are living with…not a protocol designed for someone else’s phenotype. You don’t deserve a supplement stack with an affiliate link attached, or a recovery story retrofitted into a sales page.

You deserve care that sees you and starts where you actually are. It never asks you to push through. It does not promise what it cannot deliver, and does not disappear when progress is slow.

That care exists. It is being built by researchers, clinicians, and patient advocates who have been in this fight for six years and are not going anywhere.

You are allowed to be skeptical and still be hopeful. It is unfortunately if you have been burned. I hope this piece ensures that it never happens again, and I hope you’ll find it in you to believe that real, legitimate support is still out there.

With love,
Dr. Meg

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