NEWS
Clockwise from top: Dr Richard Carmona, 17th Surgeon General & Vice Chairman, Canyon Ranch, with Dr Kavita Patel of the Brookings Institute, US; Deborah Szekely, Founder, Rancho La Puerta & The Golden Door; Dr Daniel Friedland, Medical Director at Barney & Barney and Founder & CEO of SuperSmartHealth
Global Spa & Wellness Summit 2012
Summit inspiration A round up of the Summit’s most useful business-enhancing ideas...
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• Spas as Telomere Health Centres The latest pioneering research into Telomeres, the caps of our chromosomes, shows they can indicate a person’s ‘cellular age’, and predict diseases like cancer and heart disease. As telomere testing launches to the general population in the next year, the positive impact spa and wellness therapies can have on telomere health could become a major industry opportunity.
• Mental wellness and happiness With the ‘science of happiness’ being an increasingly hot topic, spas have fresh opportunities in combating stress and promoting mental wellness. Until now spas have been perceived as places of escape. Now a new opportunity is becoming apparent to present them as places that promote brain performance and creativity. • Wellness coaching Medical studies show coaching is the superior model to traditional health education to elicit long-term behavioural change. Integrating wellness coaching represents a major, logical industry opportunity, but spas need to rewire their traditionally short-term thinking to focus on long-term client results.
• Employee wellness With employer-provided healthcare costs spiraling out of control and hundreds of studies showing employee wellness programmes reduce costs and boost productivity, two in three larger businesses worldwide now offer a formal employee wellness strategy. Spas are a very natural fi t as centres to promote workplace wellness, but need to better communicate their total health-focused packages, for example massage, fi tness, meditation, yoga, nutritional counselling, and so on.
Future’, delivered an incredibly detailed picture of the US health crisis and of the economics associated with treating disease caused directly by preventable behaviour. According to Carmona, three in four people requiring medical care in the US are suffering from self-infl icted disease and poor health as a direct result of smoking, poor nutrition and obesity, which he cited as “the greatest accelerator of poor health ever known.”
Although these were specifi cally US fi gures, they were poignant to all attending, who could draw comparisons with the growing obesity crisis engulfi ng the western world and beyond. Dr Carmona completed his talk with a call to
action, asking delegates to consider the crucial role the spa and wellness industry can play in the future as a major player in transformational health. “The spa industry has this wonderful organisation, globally, and it’s growing every year; it’s getting stronger – the platform is set,” he stated. “We need to imagine a different world where we can drive the policy, based on best practices. We can do that. The solutions are what you do every day,” he concluded.
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Brain management Dr Daniel Friedland, Medical Director at Barney & Barney, and Founder and CEO of SuperSmartHealth, provided an energetic presentation entitled ‘Let’s Neurovate: Know Your Brain to Imaginate and Innovate’, which was a fascinating tour of the human brain and how it responds to stress.
He highlighted how stress and chronic stress not only inhibit our creative abilities, but take their toll on the entire body. He described the different areas used by the brain to perform divergent and convergent thinking and how these can be shut down by exposure to everyday stress. Friedland also asked delegates to consider the intriguing role that spas could play in helping to give people tools and strategies to manage stress, and so improve their performance, health and happiness.
Telomeres: the new frontier?
Championing new frontiers on pioneering cell heath, keynote speaker Dr Elissa Epel, Co-Founder of Telome Health, who works with Nobel Laureate in Medicine Dr Elizabeth Blackburn, gave a fascinating presentation on telomeres and what they can reveal
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