National Wellness Month

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September is National Wellness Month. Each type of wellness is important across the course of life, from mental and physical wellness to social and intellectual and all other dimensions depicted in the graphic below. As we age, wellness is critical in shaping our quality of life.

Wellness is a state beyond absence of illness but rather aims to optimize well-being.

The notions behind the term share the same roots as the alternative medicine movement. In 19th-century movements in the US and Europe that sought to optimize health and to consider the whole person, like New Thought, Christian Science, and Lebensreform.^[3][4] Ayurveda mentions the concept and also has dedicated a whole speciality for the concept of wellness and maintenance of health.

The term wellness has also been misused for pseudoscientific health interventions.^[5]

The term was partly inspired by the preamble to the World Health Organization's 1948 constitution which said: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."^[2] It was initially brought to use in the US by Halbert L. Dunn, M.D. in the 1950s; Dunn was the chief of the National Office of Vital Statistics and discussed “high-level wellness,” which he defined as “an integrated method of functioning, which is oriented toward maximizing the potential of which the individual is capable.”^[2] The term "wellness" was then adopted by John Travis who opened a "Wellness Resource Center" in Mill Valley, California in the mid-1970s, which was seen by mainstream culture as part of the hedonistic culture of Northern California at that time and typical of the Me generation.^[2] Travis marketed the center as alternative medicine, opposed to what he said was the disease-oriented approach of medicine.^[2] The concept was further popularized by Robert Rodale through Prevention magazine, Bill Hetler, a doctor at University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, who set up an annual academic conference on wellness, and Tom Dickey, who established the Berkeley Wellness Letter in the 1980s.^[2] The term had become accepted as standard usage in the 1990s.^[2]

Since the beginning of the 21st century, it has been noted that mainstream news sources have begun to devote more page space to "health and wellness themes".^[6]