Defining Evidence-Based Wellness
What wellness actually means, how we evaluate what works, and why better health starts before you need a doctor.
The Short Answer
Evidence-based wellness is a practical approach to maintaining and improving health that combines the best available scientific evidence, real-world experience, and individual goals and values.
It emphasizes interventions that produce meaningful benefits, improve functional capacity and resilience, support long-term health, and carry reasonable risks.
Rather than waiting for health problems to require medical intervention, evidence-based wellness encourages people to take an active role in preserving and improving their health.
It is not a substitute for medical care. It is a complementary approach intended to improve quality of life and, where possible, reduce the need for avoidable medical interventions.
Key Takeaways
What we know
Scientific evidence, practical experience, and individual goals all provide useful information when making decisions about health. An intervention's value depends on more than whether it produces a detectable biological effect.
What evidence-based wellness emphasizes
Meaningful improvements in health, function, resilience, and quality of life, with reasonable consideration for long-term health, potential risks, and individual preferences.
What we don't know
Scientific research cannot explain every individual response or predict which interventions will work best for every person. Real-world experience can help fill practical gaps, but it cannot reliably establish causation or replace controlled research.
What this doesn't establish
Wellness practices are not substitutes for medical care. Nor does describing something as a wellness intervention establish that it prevents, treats, or cures disease.
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What Does Wellness Actually Mean?
The Wellness Industry now functions primarily as a shelter for charlatans making pseudo-medical claims without having to meet the standards of evidence required of medicine.
My background as a strength and conditioning coach gave me an up-close view of the real human cost associated with the worst parts of The Wellness Industry. Some of my clients had wasted decades of their lives and more money than you could count on miracle products and ineffective services.
After just two or three years following an effective strength training program with me, some of these people, now in their 60s, were stronger and more confident in their physical abilities than they had ever been in their lives.
That is no miracle. It's the direct result of doing things that work, consistently, for long enough to make a meaningful difference.
"The number of people who stand ready to consume one's time, to no purpose, is almost countless." - Booker T. Washington
Wellness isn't just a regulatory loophole or a marketing term. It's a legitimate philosophy for approaching how we maintain and improve our health, ideally long before we become sick.
So how do we separate interventions that genuinely improve people's lives from those that simply consume their time and money? I think we can come up with a real answer by borrowing a few ideas from some unlikely places.
Here's how I decide what's worth our time at Herbal Edge.
1. Wellness Should Be Proactive, Not Reactive
Modern medicine is extraordinarily good at emergency and acute care, but considerably less successful at managing chronic illness or keeping us healthy in the first place, for a variety of reasons.
These shortcomings aren't entirely lost on medical professionals. Several significant medical philosophies have emerged that attempt to address this issue.
- Functional medicine recognizes that physiological dysfunction can develop and be addressed long before someone meets the diagnostic criteria for a disease.
- Lifestyle medicine emphasizes using lifestyle interventions to prevent and manage chronic illness.
- Evidence-based medicine recognizes that scientific research alone cannot determine the best course of treatment for every individual. Clinical expertise and patient values and preferences must also inform medical decisions.
Where these approaches still fall short of my definition of “wellness” is that they are still largely organized around preventing, identifying, and treating illness rather than actively encouraging people to make affirmative lifestyle changes to improve their health.
Evidence-Based Wellness takes a broader approach.
I am not satisfied with platitudes like “sleep 8 hours a day,” or intervening earlier in the disease process, or even reacting to illness more effectively. We shouldn't have to wait until something is wrong with us to start making improvements.
And I am similarly unimpressed with the sort of nannying that passes for medical care in many institutions. "Stop smoking, exercise more, eat protein but not fats, and drink water."
My objective isn't simply to adopt healthy habits. It's to produce meaningful improvements in health and performance, with measurable benefits that justify the costs, risks, and tradeoffs involved.
That means identifying something worth improving, establishing a baseline, developing an actionable plan, and measuring our progress. If we aren't getting the results we want, we change the plan.
And those improvements don't have to be dramatic. Small improvements accumulated over time can make an enormous difference in someone's life. That doesn't mean wellness is only for healthy people. For the chronically or terminally ill, sometimes success means preserving the capabilities they still have or slowing the decline in quality of life.
My definition of wellness begins with taking an active role in maintaining, improving, and optimizing our health and physical capabilities, whether we're sick or not. It's about recognizing that improving our health and quality of life is an ongoing process, and not one we can outsource to medical professionals through our annual physical.
Read More →
- Why Modern Medicine Doesn't Keep Us Healthy (Publishing Soon)
2. Borrowing From Evidence-Based Medicine
The foundation of this approach comes from evidence-based medicine. In 1996, David Sackett and his colleagues published an influential paper in The BMJ titled Evidence Based Medicine: What It Is and What It Isn't.
Their argument challenged the idea that good medical practice could rely exclusively on either scientific research or the individual judgment of a physician. Instead, evidence-based medicine integrates three important considerations:
- Scientific research: The best available evidence about the effectiveness and safety of an intervention.
- Clinical experience: The knowledge and judgment developed by healthcare professionals through treating patients.
- Patient values and preferences: The individual circumstances, priorities, and preferences that influence whether a particular intervention is appropriate.
The essential point is that good decisions require more than simply identifying which treatment performed best in a clinical trial.
Research describes what happened to a particular population under specific conditions. Clinical experience often leads the research, so a clinician may have an intuition about what to do based on their own knowledge and experience, rather than something that has already been investigated in the research. But ultimately, at the end of the day the only person that can make the decision is the patient themselves, because they are the only person that has to live (or die) with the consequences of the decision.
I've borrowed this framework and adapted it to wellness.
The Three Pillars of Evidence-Based Wellness
Scientific Evidence
Scientific research helps us understand what is likely to work, what risks might be involved, and how confident we should be in those conclusions.
Practical Experience
Experience helps us understand how interventions perform outside controlled environments, what limitations emerge during everyday use, and which approaches people can realistically maintain.
Individual Goals and Values
People have different priorities, resources, preferences, and tolerances for uncertainty. What constitutes a worthwhile improvement for one person may not justify the same costs or risks for another.
The most important change is replacing clinical experience with practical experience. I'm not suggesting that a strength coach or CBD retailer has the same expertise as a physician. I'm suggesting that practical experience serves a similar function when evaluating interventions intended to improve everyday health and functioning rather than treat disease.
This approach recognizes that scientific evidence tells us what we can reasonably expect, practical experience helps us understand how to apply that knowledge for the best chance at a meaningful effect, and individual values determine what's worthwhile.
That distinction has guided my work for years. It also gives us a framework for evaluating whether something actually deserves to be called a wellness intervention.
3. What Qualifies as a Wellness Intervention?
For this part of the definition, I borrowed an idea from an unusual place: nootropics.
The term nootropic was introduced by pharmacologist Corneliu Giurgea in the 1970s to describe a particular category of substances intended to improve cognitive functioning. What interested me wasn't any particular drug. It was how Giurgea approached defining the category.
Rather than simply describing substances that affected the brain, he proposed criteria emphasizing improvements in cognitive function, protection against impairment, and relatively few adverse effects.
That's a useful distinction. A substance that changes how your brain works isn't necessarily making it work better. I think we should apply similar reasoning to wellness more broadly.
A Wellness Intervention Should:
1. Produce a Meaningful Benefit
An intervention should provide a measurable or subjectively meaningful improvement in someone's life.
A detectable biological effect is not necessarily a useful one. Something that changes a laboratory marker, influences a neurotransmitter, or activates a particular receptor hasn't automatically improved anyone's health.
We should be interested in whether those changes translate into something worthwhile.
2. Improve Resilience or Adaptation
An intervention should help people maintain their capabilities, recover from stress, or adapt to physical and psychological demands.
Strength training is an obvious example. The objective isn't simply to lift increasingly heavy weights. It's to become more physically capable.
The same reasoning applies to interventions intended to support recovery, sleep, and other aspects of everyday functioning.
3. Support Long-Term Health
The objective shouldn't simply be to produce an immediate sensation and an intervention should be compatible with maintaining or improving health over time rather than sacrificing long-term health for short-term effects.
Vitamin D supplementation meets this criteria because it often produces no meaningful change in mental state, but can support positive long term health outcomes nonetheless. Conversely many performance enhancing drugs do not meet this criteria as long term use comes with a litany of known consequences.
This doesn't mean every intervention must produce a demonstrated longevity benefit. It means we should consider the consequences of repeated use, particularly when something becomes part of a daily routine.
4. Improve Function Rather Than Impair It
Wellness should generally help people become more capable of participating in their lives, not less.
Sedation, intoxication, and other forms of impairment aren't inherently wellness benefits simply because someone finds them pleasant. Temporary impairment may be an acceptable tradeoff for a meaningful benefit, but that doesn't make the impairment itself beneficial.
The cannabis industry has developed a particularly strange relationship with this distinction.
Something can be enjoyable without being healthy. Something can provide temporary relief without improving long-term health. And something can have legitimate medical applications without being appropriate for everyday wellness use.
We can support legalization, recognize the medical applications of intoxicating cannabinoids, and acknowledge recreational use without pretending that intoxication itself promotes wellness.
The same reasoning excludes smoking cannabis as a wellness strategy. The presence of medically useful compounds doesn't somehow make inhaling combustion products good for your lungs.
5. Have a Favorable Risk Profile With Minimal Side Effects
The expected benefits should justify the potential risks, costs, and tradeoffs. Interventions intended for regular use deserve particular scrutiny because even relatively minor adverse effects can become meaningful over time.
The appropriate level of risk also depends on what we're trying to accomplish. Accepting substantial risks to treat a life-threatening illness may be reasonable. Accepting those same risks for a modest improvement in everyday functioning generally isn't.
The Importance of a Meaningful Benefit
I want to return to the first criterion because it influences how I evaluate nearly everything else.
An intervention doesn't need to produce a dramatic transformation to be worthwhile. But it does need to produce something the individual values enough to justify its costs and tradeoffs.
This idea also informs the Meaningful Dose concept in our CBD Dosing Guide. Rather than pursuing the strongest possible effect, we encourage people to identify the lowest dose that produces benefits they consider worthwhile.
More isn't automatically better. Increasing the dose may increase costs and exposure to potential side effects without producing a more meaningful benefit.
The same reasoning applies beyond supplements. A training program someone can sustain for years may be more valuable than an elaborate program that produces slightly better results for six weeks before they abandon it.
These five criteria aren't rigid rules that every intervention must satisfy equally. They're a framework for evaluating whether an intervention is likely to make someone's life better.
Read More →
- CBD Dosing Guide: The 1-2-3 Method
- Smoking is Not a Wellness Strategy (Publishing Soon)
4. A Plausible Mechanism Is Not Evidence of a Meaningful Benefit
This is one of the most common problems I encounter in the supplement industry.
A manufacturer identifies a biological mechanism through which an ingredient might produce a desirable effect. Perhaps it influences inflammatory signaling, activates a receptor, or changes the concentration of some neurotransmitter.
The company then spends three thousand words explaining the mechanism before concluding that its product supports seventeen different aspects of human health.
Very scientific. Very impressive. And potentially very misleading.
A biological mechanism can explain why something might work without establishing that it produces a meaningful benefit in humans. Conversely, we can establish that an intervention produces a useful effect before we fully understand how it works.
I try to distinguish three questions when evaluating scientific claims:
- Plausible Mechanism: Why should this work?
- Observed Effect: Does it actually work?
- Predictive Power: What should we expect to observe if our explanation is correct?
A good explanation should help us make predictions that can be tested. Otherwise, we risk collecting interesting biological facts and mistaking them for useful knowledge.
This is particularly relevant to cannabinoid science. CBD interacts with several biological systems involved in normal physiological processes, but those interactions don't establish that CBD produces meaningful improvements in every process those systems regulate.
Biological plausibility is a reason to investigate something, not a reason to promise results.
My approach is to examine the proposed mechanisms, compare them against the available human evidence, and consider what people report experiencing in the real world.
Mechanisms guide my curiosity. Meaningful outcomes guide my decisions.
Read More →
5. Final Thoughts: Taking an Active Role in Your Health
There's a distinction I've returned to repeatedly throughout my work.
Experience tells us what people observe and report. Science helps us establish whether those observations reflect genuine effects, why they occur, and whether we should expect similar results elsewhere.
Medicine uses scientific knowledge and clinical judgment to address human health problems. Marketing attempts to persuade people to purchase something.
Wellness, as I'm defining it, is about applying what we know to improve everyday life.
That might mean maintaining strength and mobility as we age, improving our sleep habits, becoming more physically active, or finding practical ways to manage the demands of everyday life.
It may also involve supplements or other interventions that offer worthwhile benefits at acceptable levels of risk. But the objective isn't to accumulate products, chase every promising new ingredient, or optimize obscure biomarkers that have no demonstrated relationship to better health.
The objective is to become healthier and more capable, maintain those improvements for as long as possible, and reduce the need for avoidable medical intervention where we can.
And I think we can be more deliberate about how we accomplish that.
A Practical Model of Wellness
Rather than simply asking, "What should I be doing to stay healthy?" I think we should be asking four questions:
1. What am I trying to improve?
Identify something that would make a meaningful difference in your health, physical capabilities, or quality of life.
2. What am I going to do, and why should it work?
Develop a practical plan informed by the best available scientific evidence, practical experience, and your individual circumstances.
3. How will I know if it's working?
Establish a baseline, evaluate your progress, and look for meaningful improvements rather than simply assuming an intervention is beneficial.
4. Is it worth it?
Consider whether the benefits justify the costs, risks, and tradeoffs involved.
That's the process: Identify, Intervene, Evaluate, Adjust.
If something is working and the benefits are worthwhile, keep doing it. If it isn't producing the results you want, change the plan. If the benefits aren't worth the tradeoffs, reconsider the intervention.
These questions won't eliminate uncertainty or answer every question about causation. But they provide a practical framework for making better decisions with the information available to us.
Making Better Decisions
This is the philosophy behind Herbal Edge and the CBD Wiki.
I want people to understand what scientific research actually establishes, how that information translates into practical decisions, and where the evidence remains uncertain.
Modern medicine is an extraordinary resource, and we should use it when we need it. But we shouldn't wait until something goes wrong before taking an active interest in our health.
I also believe people should be encouraged to question recommendations, evaluate their own experiences, and decide which benefits justify the costs and risks involved.
No study, physician, coach, or website can make every decision for you. They can provide evidence, expertise, and guidance, but you're ultimately the person living with the consequences.
My goal isn't to tell people how to live. It's to help them understand their options well enough to make better decisions for themselves.
And I think that's a pretty good definition of wellness.
About the Author
Before launching Herbal Edge, Avery Martz operated one of Idaho's largest CBD retailers, reviewing products, working with independent makers, and helping hundreds of people learn about CBD.