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 changes the experience considerably. You are not just attending — you are holding the room, watching the conversations land, noticing what the industry is ready to hear and what it is still working up to.
The talk I gave was called What Science Forgot to Measure. It was the most personal talk I have given at a major industry event, and I want to write about it here, because the response told me something about where this field actually is.
I started with the day I died. I was fourteen years old. Routine surgery. Something went wrong. And for a period I was not in my body — I was above it, watching, entirely at peace. That experience cracked something open in me: a knowing that there is more to reality than what instruments can detect. I have spent most of my career living in two worlds — the world of science and the world of that knowing — and for most of that career, I kept them carefully separate. The talk was about why that separation is a mistake, and what it is costing us.
Not in the vague sense that wellness should feel meaningful. In the specific, measurable sense that we are investing enormous resources in biological optimisation while systematically ignoring variables that have substantial evidence behind them and that the industry has collectively decided to treat as unserious.
I talked about the ACE study — Adverse Childhood Experiences — one of the largest studies ever conducted on how early trauma affects adult health. Score six or above on the ACE test, and you lose approximately twenty years of life expectancy. Twenty years. And yet the longevity industry's answer is peptides, NAD infusions, and cold exposure. We are chasing longevity in a syringe while unresolved trauma quietly steals decades. The most effective interventions for healing that trauma? They are not pharmaceutical. They are relational, somatic, and in many cases what the mainstream would call spiritual.
I talked about the replication crisis — the uncomfortable reality that a significant portion of the research underpinning current practice cannot be reproduced, and that the studies least likely to replicate are cited most frequently. This is not an argument against science. It is an argument for epistemic humility: we have turned rigour into a brand rather than a practice, and the gap between what the evidence actually shows and what the industry sells around it is wider than most people building here want to acknowledge.
And then I talked about what the evidence does show — which is that regular spiritual practice is associated with a 33 per cent reduction in all-cause mortality. Comparable to or better than many pharmaceutical interventions. That loneliness is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. That compassion reduces inflammation. That meaning and belonging are not soft extras at the end of a programme, but biological necessities — and that an industry which treats them as secondary to biomarkers has its hierarchy of evidence the wrong way around. If any of this were a drug, it would be worth trillions. The reason it hasn't been built into longevity protocols is that you cannot patent presence.
The response in the room was something I had not quite expected. Not resistance — recognition. Practitioners who have watched dropout rates stay stubbornly flat for decades despite every clinical advancement. Scientists who know the evidence and have been uncertain how to use it in a context that treats the word "spiritual" as a liability. Several people told me afterwards that they had been thinking about this for years and had not known how to say it in a room that prizes its scientific credibility above almost everything else.
That hesitancy is itself worth examining. The wellness industry has spent a generation earning legitimacy, and the attempt has been necessary. But it has produced a culture within the field that treats the felt experience of a person — their grief, their meaning, their inner life, their relationship to something larger than themselves — as somehow less rigorous than a blood panel. The evidence does not support that distinction. Neither does thirty years of watching people try to change how they live.
What I said in Dubai, and what I believe: the real longevity question is not how to live to 150. It is how to be fully alive for the years you have. The next health revolution will not be a supplement. It will be a return to something older — meaning, ritual, belonging — and the science that is slowly, carefully, proving what healers have known for thousands of years.
It was worth co-chairing a summit to be in the room when that conversation started to feel possible.