WELLNESS: REMEDY PLACE

Social Self-Care Is Here To Save Us

In the US, social wellness club chain Remedy Place is revolutionising how people take care of themselves. NADINE DILONG talks to its Founder, DR JONATHAN LEARY

Dr Leary, if you had to describe what Remedy Place is to someone that is not particularly familiar with wellness offerings, what would you say?

Remedy Place is the world’s first social wellness club. We are not a gym, we are not a spa, we are not a med-spa and we do not focus on beauty. Our full focus is on self-care with a social twist. Furthermore, our club’s environments are designed to heal, meaning that we use our spaces to start the healing process from the moment you walk in. On top of that we make sure we offer an unparalleled experience that allows each one of our remedies to be done in pairs or groups. That way you can enjoy the club together, whether it is a date, a meeting, an afterwork hangout, birthday or a full on event, etc.

In short, our prime focus is on holistic self-care, our experiences are built around doing things together instead of by yourself and our environment/design is part of our healing process.

What made you believe in this concept?

I have been working on Remedy Place since 2012. It was always my dream practice idea from the moment I started my business plan. I knew that I wanted to create something different from anything else out there and I wanted to cultivate an environment different from anything else I saw in normal healthcare.

Previously, when volunteering in hospitals during my pre-med studies I saw the chaos and stress constantly (not only for the patients but also for the doctors and hospital staff) and I knew there was a huge opportunity for improvement.

At the end of 2015 I completed the original business plan during my four years of doctorate studies, but when it came time for funding I quickly found out business loans were not an option. I was then forced to pivot and then opened my own concierge practice, which I had for five years before the first club opened. During this time period I constantly updated the business plan after listening to my patients, seeing what worked, what didn’t work, what they were willing to change, what they were not, what stressors they all experienced, etc. This data and clinical evidence shaped the foundation of Remedy Place and put me in the perfect position to look at all of the issues I saw in the industry, and then create the solutions to them while making sure it was also a smart business.

Dr Jonathan Leary, Founder of Remedy Place

In short, my findings were: environment plays a major role in the healing process (based on the quick success in my patients’ homes), alternative medicine, preventative care and lifestyle changes were the only way to fix the root cause of my patients’ health issues (based on over 1,200 patient success stories over the years) and lastly almost every single patient I had said because of their healthier lifestyle changes they felt restricted and sometimes lonely because it restricted their social life.

The solution: make self-care a regular practice, make an environment that is designed to heal and make it social (so we can enhance their health and social life at the same time).

What are some of the offerings that can be done in groups at Remedy Place?

Remedy Place is a social wellness club so everything in the space is designed to be experienced with someone else, but you can also experience everything alone.

Our most famous experience is our breathwork ice bath class. As the first place in the world to offer commercialised breathwork ice bath classes, this has been a huge hit for us! We have over a million views on our Remedy Place TikTok. Check out our social channels to look inside our guests’ favorite social self-care experience @remedyplace.

Remedy Place encourages people to gather

The club also offers scheduled events, like non-alcoholic happy hours, that create different social moments for people to gather.

Why is this social aspect so important?

We have known for a long time that there is correlation between isolation and mental health, but due to the pandemic now we have seen the effects of isolation on physical health. Humans need to be around humans and that is why at Remedy Place we use human connection to enhance guests’ health and social lives at the same time. We call it Social Self-Care™ (Social self-care is the act of deepening human connection while simultaneously improving your overall health through meaningful experiences with others.)

How do you ensure the balance between social, comfortable environment and medical treatments?

Safety is our number one priority. Every single service has the option to be private and much more intimate. When designing the clubs it has always been done to ensure flexibility based on guests’ needs and wants. With that being said our focus is holistic self-care and preventive care, and less of treating medical conditions.

Who is the ‘average’ Remedy Place client and how often do they visit?

From a gender point of view it is almost 50/50. The largest majority of guests fall within the 30-40-year-old range, however, we have guests as young as 19 to guests in their 60s. All of our guests are people that prioritise their health, want to feel good and want to work on and develop themselves to be better. Some members come every single day, however, on average guests are coming in between 2-3x per week.

Do you have any plans to open locations outside the US?

Yes, our end goal is to have Remedy Place locations worldwide and to help make people feel better and allow them to take control of their health. We currently have other locations in the works!

There is a huge wellness market in Australia and I think people would be very receptive to the Remedy Place mission. Everyone in the world needs self-care, ways to offset stress and healthier ways to socialise! With that being said we have been asked many times to open there! I think it will eventually happen but in this early stage of the company a majority of our focus is to stay in the states!

Do you think we are truly taking our health and well-being more seriously now or could this just be a short-lived post-pandemic fad?

100%. Over the past ten years I have seen the shift to people realising they were the only ones that could make themselves healthy. Furthermore, people are realising there are a lot more things to do to take control of your health outside of nutrition and movement. The world is more sick and more stressed than ever and now we need to find more ways to counteract that!

This is not a fad, the one good thing that came out of this tragedy was the awareness of our health and how to take care of ourselves on a global scale. This was the light switch the world needed to have to shift its perspective on health.

Dr. Jonathan Leary is the founder and CEO of Remedy Place. Remedyplace.com