14 Oct 2021
The convergence of healthcare and wellness: Global Wellness Summit announces key topics for 2021 conference
BY Megan Whitby
The Global Wellness Summit (GWS) has today announced its first round of speakers for the 2021 Summit.
The 15th annual conference will take place in person in Boston, Massachusetts, and virtually all over the world, during 30 November - 3 December.
The event’s theme is “A New New Era in Health & Wellness.” The agenda will explore the future ahead as healthcare and wellness converge in more obvious ways.
“Traditional medicine and wellness have long had a siloed, even combative relationship, but Covid has accelerated new conversations and collaborations as healthcare digests the human and economic costs of not focusing on prevention,” said Susie Ellis, chair and CEO of GWS.
“Everything is getting a ‘rethink’: Healthcare is shifting in so many ways to a more holistic model of health and wellbeing, just as wellness companies are now forced to embrace hard science and evidence.
“In light of this, we’re bringing together leaders across healthcare and self-care to discuss what this very different future will look like – a future where wellness takes a much bigger role in medicine and science takes a much bigger role in wellness.”
The GWS 2021 will gather leading doctors and healthcare executives from research organisations such as Harvard, MIT, Cleveland Clinic and Pfizer to tackle this topic.
Select speakers on the future of healthcare will include:
• Michael Roizen, MD, is the first chief wellness officer and an internist and anesthesiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and co-chair of this year’s conference. The author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers, his career has been focused on motivating behaviour change to help people live better and in better health for much longer. His keynote will explore how a new focus on longevity and longevity science will transform medicine.
• Jeffrey Rediger, MD, is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a practising physician at McLean Hospital. Firmly rooted in traditional medicine, his book Cured is the result of his spending 17 years exhaustively studying individuals who have “spontaneously” recovered from incurable illnesses (whether cancer or arthritis) – research that persuaded him that it’s way past time to embrace holistic health that focuses on an individual’s needs, while not eschewing the proven results modern medicine offers.
• Susan Silbermann is a former top executive at Pfizer who, prior to her retirement earlier this year after a 30-year career at the pharmaceutical giant, chaired Pfizer’s Global Covid-19 Task Force. She will lead a provocative panel with leading pharmaceutical executives on some eye-opening new intersections between wellness, healthcare and medicine.
• Nicola Finley, MD, a board-certified internal medicine physician and faculty member at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona, will lead a panel on how the pandemic exposed inequities in both healthcare and wellness and how that will be tackled in the future.
To see an updated preview of 2021 speakers, click here (check back for updates).
Registration is now open for the in-person event at the Encore Boston Harbor; space is extremely limited.
Virtual delegates from around the world will be hosted by Anna Bjurstam, Six Senses Wellness Pioneer and a GWS Board member, who provided the dynamic virtual experience during last year’s event.
Virtual attendees will have access to the entire on-stage agenda – live and on-demand – as well as special breakout sessions and online networking opportunities. Register to attend virtually here.
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