The Global Wellness Summit has been a fixed point in my year since 2006. Nineteen years of watching an industry evolve.
From a collection of spa professionals talking quietly about things the mainstream hadn't yet noticed, to a gathering that now includes scientists, economists, architects, tech founders, and governments trying to understand what happens when health becomes the organising principle of daily life. Dubai in November 2025 was the first time I co-chaired it. That was a different kind of experience.
The theme that dominated both the formal sessions and the conversations in the margins was one that has been building for several years: the convergence of clinical medicine and wellness. Longevity clinics embedded in hotels. Wearable diagnostics being adopted at scale. GLP-1 and its implications for the food, fitness and hospitality industries simultaneously. The question of what distinguishes treating disease from building health — and whether the same organisation can credibly do both.
This convergence is real, and it is moving faster than most organisations are equipped to navigate. The gap between what is scientifically available and what is actually being delivered in most wellness environments is wide and growing. The most interesting people I spoke with in Dubai were wrestling with that gap in concrete terms — not as a positioning question, but as an operational one. What does a medical director in a wellness setting actually do on a Tuesday? Who is liable when a biohacking protocol interacts badly with a pre-existing condition? How do you build a team that spans physician and practitioner without losing the rigour of either?
These are not comfortable questions. The Summit is at its best when it is asking them anyway.
The talk I gave in Dubai was on what I have been calling Pleasure Health — the argument that pleasure is not the opposite of serious wellness, but one of its most important biological levers. The nervous system of the person sitting in front of you is not persuaded by excellent science. It is persuaded by experience. An industry that has aligned itself primarily with discipline and self-improvement has systematically underinvested in the dimension most likely to produce lasting behaviour change.
The response was interesting. The room understood it immediately — the concept is not new to practitioners who have watched dropout rates stay stubbornly flat for decades despite significant investment in clinical sophistication. The more revealing conversations happened afterwards, where several senior industry figures told me quietly that they had been thinking about something similar for years, but had been hesitant to say it in a room full of scientists.
That hesitancy is worth examining. The wellness industry has spent a generation earning scientific credibility. The attempt has been necessary and substantially successful. But it has created a culture within the field that treats the felt experience of the person — their pleasure, their sense of meaning, their inner life — as somehow less serious than their biomarkers. The science does not support this distinction. Neither does thirty years of watching people try to change how they live.
What I took from Dubai is that the field is genuinely at an inflection point. The science is excellent, the infrastructure is building, and the question the industry is beginning to ask — what does it actually take for a person to want to live differently, and to keep choosing it? — is finally the right one.
The answers are still arriving. It was worth co-chairing a summit to be part of the conversation.