Massage was once considered a fringe therapy, but later morphed into present-day physiotherapy. Swiss medical student Maximilian Bircher-Benner first blended a breakfast of oats, nuts and fruit, aka muesli, for hospital patients.
But sometimes ideas flow in the other direction, too, and legitimate medical therapies are offered by untrained or barely trained people who can do real harm.
Here are five examples of wellness trends that borrow from mainstream medicine.
Since the 1990s, health professionals have been injecting Botox into people’s faces to temporarily paralyse the muscles that cause wrinkles.
Gadgets allow us to track how much we eat, what we eat, our sleep and exercise but experts say they’re not always making us healthier.
Wellbeing
1. Ozone therapy
Ozone (O₃) is a form of oxygen. Ordinary oxygen (O₂), sometimes with ozone added, can be applied to wounds via a bag or sealed chamber to help them heal. It does this by helping the body fight infection and form collagen.
But “ozone therapy” – the weird, unlicensed version – puts ozone, or ozone and oxygen, directly into the person’s body. It can go in via the lungs, or via intravenous injection, or it can be pumped into the rectum or vagina.
Practitioners claim it can reduce inflammation or even treat cancer or HIV/AIDS, despite no evidence for such health benefits.
It can also cause fatal air embolisms – bubbles of gas in the bloodstream that can block blood flow to vital organs.
If you don’t get enough of a certain vitamin or mineral through your diet, you can take a supplement. But if that doesn’t work, in some cases, you might need to go to a hospital or a doctor’s surgery to get a medically supervised infusion that’s delivered into the vein (an IV infusion).
For instance, iron infusions help people with serious iron deficiencies.
IV needles in untrained hands can be dangerous. They can cause phlebitis (inflammation of the vein) and infiltration (when the IV fluid or medication leaks into the surrounding areas). They can also lead to infection.
And unlike therapeutic vitamin IV infusions administered in hospitals, these non-traditional treatments are not regulated by Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration. So you might also not be getting the magic IV potion you’re paying for.
The bacterium Clostridium botulinum produces a neurotoxin – a poison that affects nerves. For decades, it’s been used therapeutically to treat excess sweating and migraine, among other conditions. Today, we call this neurotoxin Botox.
Since about the 1990s, health professionals have been injecting it into people’s faces to temporarily paralyse the muscles that cause wrinkles.
It’s legal, it’s a registered product, and in trained hands, it’s safe to use.
The Medical Council of New Zealand last outlined the standards it expects of doctors who perform cosmetic procedures in 2017.
In 2023, Auckland cosmetic medicine expert Dr Sarah Hart told RNZ her clients frequently complained about “botched” procedures at the hands of under-trained injectors.
Apheresis is the process of separating blood into its component parts by spinning it at high speed in a special machine.
Using a process called selective apheresis, clinicians can separate out and remove specific molecules or antibodies.
For example, a person has very high cholesterol that doesn’t respond to normal treatments can undergo lipid apheresis to “wash out” harmful lipoproteins from their blood.
It’s easy to see how the idea of “washing” your blood could be misunderstood and misapplied.
When a diver gets “the bends” from too much nitrogen forming in their body, they can be treated in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, where they receive 100 percent oxygen in a pressurised chamber.
There isn’t enough good science to back up any of these claims. There also isn’t enough science to suggest it makes your skin look younger.