Biostatistician Halbert Dunn's 1961 book, High Level Wellness, set the stage for the modern wellness movement. Derek reads it alongside some of today's top conspiritualists, noticing the themes (and differences) that run throughout Dunn's work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| You ever think about the things we take for granted? | |
| For example, statistics. | |
| We can quickly find out population data, birth and death rates, and marriage and divorce rates. | |
| While it would seem strange to not know these things, there was a whole lot of bureaucracy that had to happen for us to be able to access that knowledge. | |
| In America, one leading figure responsible for establishing our national vital statistics was Halbert Dunn. | |
| He was the first biostatistician hired by the Mayo Clinic in 1929, and he helped establish the first coding system for medical statistics, going on to run the National Office for Vital Statistics from 1925 through 1960. | |
| Outside of his administrative work, Dunn had other interests, and they also involved health. | |
| In the late 1950s, he gave a series of 29 lectures at the Unitarian Church in Arlington County, Virginia, on topics like achieving higher potential of functioning. | |
| If that sort of language sounds familiar, that's because Dunn is known as the father of modern wellness, and the book that came out of the lecture series introduced the concept of high level wellness to America. | |
| His book is titled High Level Wellness, and it was published in 1961. | |
| The book, it didn't do very well. | |
| Dunn is not a household name, though he became very influential to future leaders of the wellness movement. | |
| While reading through his collection of lectures, I was struck by how many Maha influencers are simply repeating sentiments that he expressed well over half a century ago. | |
| I know I shouldn't be surprised. | |
| And to be clear, I don't consider Dunn a grifter. | |
| He was a government employee that was truly invested in people's health, not someone trying to push supplements or ice bath protocols. | |
| He's also not trying to pretend that he has solutions. | |
| The book is a bit quaint and charming in that sort of 20th century, mid-century theory of everything sort of way. | |
| But I want to talk about it today because within that book are the seeds of modern wellness. | |
| I often talk on this podcast how rhetoric that I heard in yoga studios in the 90s, like, you are your own best doctor, and nobody knows your body better than you. | |
| All that has informed and influenced a generation of people who have now weaponized such sentiments. | |
| You are your own best doctor has become don't trust doctors, which is an actual tweet that RFK Jr. advisor Callie Mean sent out a year ago. | |
| So maybe in this journey today you'll recognize, as I did, how such sentiments evolve. | |
| Speaking of the meanses, Callie and his sister Casey wrote a best-selling book on metabolic health, it was called Good Energy, despite neither having trained as an endocrinologist. | |
| This phenomenon certainly rhymes with Dunn, a statistician edging into science-ish throughout his book. | |
| And both quickly turned toward the murky realm of metaphysics when they tried to explain health. | |
| For example, take this quote from Dunn in his chapter, Man as a Manifestation of Energy. | |
| At certain moments in time, the direction which energy fields take can be influenced by very delicate forces. | |
| It is my view that when energy fields come into balance, the thought process itself can affect the direction which the energy fields will then take. | |
| This is the reason why purpose in life is so very important to human beings. | |
| Dunn spends the entire chapter defining his theories of energy fields after opening by telling us that his friend, who is a physicist, can't really define energy, so there's at least some recognition of speculation. | |
| We've evolved in physics as much as biology now, though. | |
| So you fast forward a half century, and RFK Jr. likely very informed by the means, given that Cali is one of his top advisors and Casey is his nominee for Surgeon General. | |
| Well, he claims that he can identify mitochondrial challenges in children by looking at them in airports. | |
| Yeah, that's not a thing, and it's also creepy as fuck, but that's his claim, not mine. | |
| The means is talk a lot about mitochondria in their book, and while they speak in science ish throughout, you discover the real issue is a spiritual crisis, which they write about in their chapter, Everything Is Connected. | |
| Quote, we are locked into a reductionist, fragmented view of the body that breaks us into dozens of separate parts. | |
| This view does not foster human flourishing. | |
| In reality, the body is an awe-inspiring and interconnected entity that is constantly regenerating and exchanging energy and matter with the external environment every time we eat, breathe, or bask in sunlight. | |
| When the biggest criticism of their book by actual metabolic experts has been that they try to reduce nearly all disease to a crisis of metabolism. | |
| This makes sense if you're trying to sell continuous glucose monitors as Casey's company does, or if you're selling hundreds of supplements as Callie's company does. | |
| At least Halberd Dunn never sold all med products. | |
| I'm Derek Barris and you're listening to a Conspirituality Bonus Episode: How Wellness Influencers Became Radicalized. | |
| Let's get into it.com slash conspirituality, where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing. | |
| You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. |