I keep seeing wellness platforms marketed as "personalised health." When you look under the hood, the personalisation is a name at the top of a generic programme. That's not precision health. That's a mail merge.
What You Need to Know
- Most "personalised wellness" products personalise the branding, not the health intervention
- Real precision health uses biological data, genetics, biomarkers, metabolomics, to tailor recommendations to the individual
- The gap between marketing language and clinical reality is creating cynicism that undermines legitimate precision health efforts
- If a wellness product doesn't ask for a biological sample, it's a lifestyle programme with your name on it
The Personalisation Illusion
Here's a test. Take any "personalised wellness" platform and ask: what data does it use to personalise? If the answer is a questionnaire about your goals and preferences, it's not personalised health. It's a choose-your-own-adventure wellness programme.
Real personalisation starts with biology. Your genome. Your blood biomarkers. Your metabolic profile. These aren't preferences. They're facts about your body that determine how you respond to food, exercise, medication, and stress.
95%
of 'personalised wellness' apps use self-reported data only, with no integration of biological markers
Source: Rock Health Digital Health Consumer Survey, 2022
When I was building Edison, we worked with actual genomic data. A person's pharmacogenomic profile could tell us whether a common medication would work for them or cause adverse effects. Their genetic risk scores could flag conditions decades before symptoms. That's personalisation. It changes what a clinician recommends. It changes outcomes.
A quiz that sorts you into "stress management" versus "weight loss" doesn't change outcomes. It changes the colour scheme.
Why This Matters
The wellness-washing problem isn't just annoying. It's actively harmful.
When people experience "personalised health" that's just a repackaged generic programme, they become sceptical of the entire concept. Clinicians see the marketing, roll their eyes, and dismiss precision health alongside the nonsense. And the organisations that could benefit most from genuine precision approaches, employers dealing with rising health costs, health systems managing chronic disease, stop listening.
I've sat in meetings where executives conflate a wellness app's "personalised nutrition plan" with pharmacogenomic-guided treatment. They're not the same thing. One is content marketing. The other changes clinical decisions.
The Line Is Simple
If a health product claims personalisation, ask one question: does it use biological data to change the clinical recommendation?
If yes, it's precision health. If no, it's a lifestyle product. Both have value. But calling a lifestyle product "precision health" devalues the science and misleads the buyer.
We need to hold the industry to a higher standard. The science is too important to be diluted by marketing departments who've discovered that "personalised" sells.