On Greedy Holistic Healers
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On Greedy Holistic Healers
And the problem with pricing
So I’m looking for a practitioner of an obscure healing method, but it’s got to be affordable. I find an American woman currently living abroad and the exchange rate is favorable, so I send her a message via WhatsApp to find out her fees. It’s never good when fees aren’t posted on a person’s website, and this person was no exception. She got back to me right away but wants $300. PER HOUR. Not $300 for a three-hour session, $300 for ONE HOUR.
Well, I’m not willing to spend that much on an unknown practitioner, and I kind of have an issue with rates that high in general. But what rates are too high? Do I charge too much if my fees are $150 for an Ayurvedic intake? What’s reasonable with inflation?
Most people can’t afford even average per-hour rates, and so they don’t go to holistic practitioners. Instead, they go online and get misguided if not outright bad advice from untrained people chirping out instant cures and canned protocols on various Facebook and Telegram groups.
Then a number of people have a bad reaction to said canned advice and think all holistic health is bunkum, so we are left with a big mess.
Organizations like the National Ayurvedic Medical Association are looking to get Ayurveda officially recognized so that insurance will cover it, but I don’t think that will fix things...it will just make things worse in the long run. Since when has health insurance actually lowered the cost of healthcare in the long run?
And when you are dealing with a weird and obscure healing methodology, insurance will never pay for that anyway.
The problem is, healers need to be paid, but they also need to be affordable. The best healer in the world isn’t going to help the average person if they are gatekeeping with a massive price that only affluent people can afford.
When it comes to pricing, I’m of the mind that the people who charge the most aren’t usually the people who are best at what they do – those people are the ones who are the best at marketing.
Usually the famous healers will charge $500 or more – like Medical Medium, who frankly I’m not impressed with and I think is a bit overhyped. Another “master healer” who overcharges is “Master Doctor” Zhi Gang Sha. He has a lot of great students and some free offerings, but I don’t trust that he’s in the healing business entirely to help people so much as make a ton of money. He was charging $10,000 for a karma clearing years ago, and that was long before our current inflation.
You could spend a fortune getting energetic power-ups through Master-Doctor Sha. Free offerings are available, and I do believe some of Sha’s techniques work well enough, but why the constant sales pitch?
I dropped out of four-year “Sufi” spiritual healing program because it became clear that they were more about the money than they let on. Courses were costing $10,000 and everyone had to do “work study” to afford it. Except, the work study was devalued at something like $15/hour. And no scholarships were offered. Everyone had to pay something. So you ended up paying $2,000 or more while being expected to work 10+ hours per week.
After I noticed the head teacher pressuring an elderly woman to stay for year two - by freaking her out that she was going to die and go to hell if she didn’t stay, a dire warning he allegedly gleaned via his so-called “intuitive” powers - I left. Got out after the first year. So did a friend I met in the program.
We learned afterwards, via some additional research, that this particular teacher and his prior guru (since deceased) had been accused of scamming students for money for decades, along with promoting Ponzi schemes. The dead guru had also been accused of sexual abuse to boot! Yet we were told that said guru was the equivalent of a Sufi saint!
The holistic healing world is full of egotists and scam artists. It’s not just the new age. I saw a YouTube video a while back where Christian healer Joan Hunter (daughter of two very famous faith healers) was egging on a poor senior woman to tithe to her, out of the idea that it would bring in more of God’s abundance if she did. They were both jumping around onstage about an extra couple hundred dollars the woman had gotten a hold of “miraculously.”
I actually like Joan Hunter, she has a neat personality, but I think she bought into her own hype and the BS of the prosperity gospel. She manipulated that poor woman to give her money she really didn’t need, and it was a sad sight to see. Whether Hunter did it unconsciously or maliciously, the result is the same – the woman was taken advantage of.
I don’t necessarily think all of these “healers” are being intentionally greedy. They’ve rationalized their greed. I believe quite a few of these folks who overcharge (or beg for money from sick seniors) are somehow fooling themselves that “God will provide” or the universe will “manifest” the money.
Rationalizing their greed and need for money.
So, I am wary of people who charge a lot. Someone who charges something decent but still “reasonable” is likely the best bet, unless you find a healer who is comfortable enough financially they can afford to be 100% generous.
So let’s compare that Sufi spiritual healing program I was in and left, to a Qigong healing program I’m currently enrolled in. The “Sufi” program cost $10,000/year and involved a few weekend workshops and some group calls every month. And it was pretty disorganized.
In contrast, if you want a very generous healing community, Teacher Wei from Mingjue Healing offers a very affordable one-year program. Teacher Wei does week-long workshops of a few hours per call approximately once per month and then the local organizers have daily, lengthy, constant practice sessions going on, to the point of it being overkill. It’s a lot of value for the cost. If you enroll again for a retake, the cost is half-off. The third year is half-off the price of the second year.
Not all healing programs need to be uber expensive.
It’s not wrong for healers to charge. It’s been a long-standing maxim that some sort of energy exchange is recommended. I have certainly found that when I offered a free life coaching session on my website, people didn’t really respect my time that much. People who don’t pay or are uber cheap are in general flakier clients, less grateful, and don’t do their homework.
Cheap clients are often the worst clients. Don’t ask me why.
So I’m not saying healers shouldn’t charge, but we do need to find some ways to make healing more accessible for people who want to pay but can’t, and who would respect and value low-cost services.
On Greedy Holistic Healers
Brave topic to address. During my working years I paid and paid and paid for health support from the non-allopathic system - to try to deal with Fibromyalgia. Then I retired and had to live on a pension set way below the poverty line. It dawned on me that I could no longer afford ANY level of alternative care. I had not been to a doctor for 30 years but found myself forced back into the allopathic system as no other form of non-allopathic help is available to me.
I am lucky because I have many years of training in various alternative modalities, and I understand them well enough to self-medicate. I had succeeded in managing my FMS until covid and long covid damaged my body to the point where I did not understand it any more, and where existing management routines were no longer working. But there is the next rub. I can no longer afford the supplements anyway. I took out a loan to afford the FLCCC protcols after my run-in with supposed covid, and am now having to pay that back - which is why I am so angry at them for conning us into thinking we are dealing with the spike protein as the source of our ill-health and believing that their protocol had some merit. 8 months of their protocol achieved nothing but a financial debt for me to repay, and continued declining health. I cannot keep up any form of supplementation at this level. I have had to work out how to give myself a chance of living, without the support of supplements, let alone practitioners.
I am writing up for myself (but will publish it for others) a whole range of behavioural changes that will support my body in its attempt to heal itself. These might cost initially, but each cost is a one-off, such as getting a comfortable chair for my balcony so I can ensure sun exposure on days when I can't get out into the weather.
Following behavioural changes is dietary changes, including foods, herbs and spices used as both food and medicines. This is a case of substituting one dietary input for another. The healthier replacement is often more costly that the original, so the increased cost is ongoing, but is far more manageable than the cost of supplements.
After behavioral and dietary changes comes supplements for those who are able to afford them. After that comes practitioner support, so really you are only accessible to the fairly well heeled.
As an alternative practitioner, you have to factor into your prices the TOTAL cost to the customer. There is the expense of travelling to and from your clinic, there is your fee, and there is the cost of whatever you require them to do before their next visit. There is simply no way I can even imagine handling these costs.
I am currently preparing a whole batch of (free) Substack posts on what we can do, for free, to try to save our own lives. As taking responsibility for our own health is so alien to our culture, and as I have no authority for what I am saying, I cannot imagine a large readership. This means there is no potential for this to make me money, and frankly, I could not live with myself if I thought I had potentially lifesaving (if unproven) information and was charging for it.
For your own practice you might want to discriminate between the type of support you offer. I differentiate between information and personalised attention. Personally I think it is unforgivable to charge for information, except where there are publishing costs, when a one off charge is OK. But there are still very few naturopaths or any other form of natural practitioner publishing information we can use to help ourselves, for free, on the internet (such as the naturopathic version of the FLCCC protocols). That tells us all we need to know about non-allopathic health care practitioners. Not one of them is prepared to take the time and the effort to publish ANYTHING to help us. Their message! You pay or you die!
It may have been you or someone else who protested that natural healing does not work that way, that there is no "one size fits all", but frankly, it has to find a way of working that way. We are undergoing a genocide of the human race. At least the bottom 40%, financially, in western countries cannot afford your personalised care, so what else can you offer them? If you are a genuine healer, this question will disturb you, and I think it does. People are dying, slowly and painfully, and only government mandated allopathic medicine is available to them, and we know how well that works, don't we! If natural medicine does not provide even the most basic "first aid" for those suffering all the various forms of long covid, then it is useless to our current society. You have to provide "first aid", "one size helps all" type information or you have made yourselves irrelevant to the future of mankind.
Charging for personalised time and attention is OK with me, as long as the price is commensurate with average or mean incomes. In recent years, consultation fees have skyrocketed while fixed incomes have stagnated. Sure, charge what you can get, but don't expect us to continue to pay your prices when we cannot even afford decent food, and don't complain when we don't. But please, put yourself out there and provide "first aid" level information on the web for free. It would be the best form of self-promotion you could do anyway.
You can work with the concept of "buying time". I do this for people with cancer. I give them a juicing protocol that they can do immediately, and that will slow the progress of the cancer. Then it is up to them to find a practitioner who successfully treats cancer and can target their particular cancer in their particular physiology. This may take a while, and they may move between a few practitioners until they find one they are comfortable with (or can afford). My sister gained 13 years this way, and my cousin gained 10 years this way, both of them with 6 months prognoses.
Long covid sufferers need to buy time until we work out what is really causing the problem and how to treat it, but natural practitioners will not even give us help to "buy time", until something better comes along.
Yup. I’m retired now but was in the forefront of establishing alternative medicine in Dallas decades ago. A cO-founding member of the American Herbalists Guild and the American Botanical Council in TX. I had a small clinic in Dallas and struggled with the fee issue. I kept it affordable. Did not make a ton of money. In fact, without a partner I could not have survived on what I made. But it paid my overhead with a tad leftover for an occassional upgrade or splurge for myself or family. But I could not have saved for retirement. And overall, this is wrong. But not tending to people in need is wrong, as well so I made the best compromise I could, monetarily, and lived a full life I’m proud of. I have a dead partner’s pension and SS which people try to tell me is a handout. As well as a current partner’s pension. Both military. All of it earned by hard work. So I’m blessed and I like to think it’s because I chose the right path. Nowadays I work with anyone who is in need free of charge because I can. Except for the products of course. And teach a little. And research things and keep an eye n what is going on and help to educate people on all of that. Greed is a universal human trait that I doubt we will ever outgrow. Unless, of course, we all get programmed as trans humans into something else that isn’t human. Won’t be much better in my opinion. We just need to keep at it. Stay human. Try to walk the best path, spiritually and hope for the best.