Health Is Becoming a Ritual Category

Medicine treats episodes. Women live through transitions. The next opportunity in health is designing the rituals that connect the two.

There is a gap between what medicine treats, what people do, and how they actually live. A doctor may diagnose a condition and prescribe a treatment, but most health outcomes are shaped by what happens outside the clinic: whether someone sleeps well, exercises, manages stress, takes medication consistently, understands what is happening to their body, and has support through major life transitions. Those everyday realities often determine whether care succeeds, yet they are rarely connected into a single system. As a result, people are left to navigate the space between medical advice and daily life on their own.

Healthcare speaks about women’s health largely through the language of disease, risk, access, and intervention. All of that matters. But it misses something structural about how health actually arrives in a person’s life. Most health is not experienced as a clinical event, even when a clinical event eventually gives it a name. It is experienced first as a pattern, a routine, a transition, a private concern that slowly becomes part of identity, a set of behaviors repeated every day long before it becomes a diagnosis, a prescription, or a treatment plan.

In other words, health is lived through rituals.

The women’s health gap, the difference between how long women live and how long they live in good health, equates to roughly 75 million years of life lost every year. Closing it is modeled as a $1 trillion annual addition to global GDP by 2040. But that value does not sit only inside hospitals. It sits inside days: the sleep, the work, the energy, the participation that chronic, untreated, under-designed transitions quietly erode.

Beauty understood the ritual layer before medicine did

Consider how thoroughly the beauty industry understood something medicine did not. A moisturizer, a serum, a workout, a fragrance, a morning routine: these are not only products. They are identity cues, social signals, forms of self-authorship. Beauty took ordinary daily maintenance and turned it into culture. The “get ready with me” video is not really about cosmetics. It is a structured, repeatable, shareable ritual of transformation, and it became one of the most durable formats on the internet because it gave people a script for becoming.

Women’s health is saturated with moments that have exactly this ritual potential, and they have almost never been designed with the same imagination.

Menopause is not a hormonal event. It is a multi-year transition through sleep, skin, strength, sexuality, metabolism, mood, confidence, work, and identity. Fertility is not a medical pathway. It is calendars, uncertainty, hope, grief, secrecy, logistics, and financial pressure. Postpartum is not a recovery window. It is the reorganization of the self.

Each of these is a threshold. None of them comes with a rite.

Instead, the infrastructure around them is fragmented by design. The clinic sees one slice. The brand sees another. The app sees a third. The employer sees a fourth. The woman is left to assemble continuity out of pieces that were never meant to fit together, which is precisely the work that ritual, historically, did for her.

Why ritual matters

Émile Durkheim argued that ritual is not decoration around belief. It is the machinery that produces belief. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he showed that shared, repeated, embodied practice generates collective effervescence, the binding energy that turns a crowd of individuals into a community and marks certain things as sacred.

Ritual is how a group makes meaning legible to itself. It is also how an individual crosses from one state of being into another with the group as witness.

Durkheim had a word for what happens when those structures fail: anomie (translated from Greek as “lawlessness,” the term denotes a condition of normlessness where individuals feel disconnected, disoriented, and alienated due to the erosion of societal guidelines for behavior).

It was meant to illustrate the disorientation of a person whose meaning-making scaffolding has collapsed. It is an apt description of how many women report experiencing perimenopause, postpartum, or a new diagnosis today. The body changes. The identity shifts. There is no rite, no cohort, no language, no marked threshold. The transition is real, but it happens in private and without form.

Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner mapped what is missing. Every rite of passage has three stages: separation, liminality, and reincorporation. The dangerous part is the liminal middle, the in-between state a person is never meant to navigate alone. Modern medicine treats many transitions women routinely experience throughout their lives as liminal states with no ritual attached, and then are surprised that women feel lost in it.

The spillover is already measurable

Use of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss more than doubled in eighteen months, from 5.8% of US adults in February 2024 to 12.4% in 2025. By 2025, 23% of US households had a GLP-1 user. By 2030, GLP-1 households are projected to account for 35% of US food and beverage units sold.

Users consume fewer calories, spend less on groceries, and change their relationship to restaurants, snacking, clothes, appetite, dating, body image, and self-presentation. A medical intervention became a cultural force.

GLP-1s are not an anomaly. They are a signal of a structural shift: the moment a health intervention stops being a clinical episode and becomes a lived identity, complete with new rituals around food, social eating, dressing, dating, and self-presentation. The drug is the smallest part of what changed. The ritual reorganization around it is the large part, and almost none of it happens inside a doctor’s office.

Meanwhile the meaning gap shows up directly on payroll. Menopause alone, administered by the clinical system as a scatter of unrelated symptoms rather than a coherent transition, is associated with an estimated $1.8 billion in lost work time annually in the United States, rising to $26.6 billion once medical costs are included. Thirteen percent of women in the Mayo Clinic study reported an adverse work outcome, missed days, cut hours, or leaving a job, tied to symptoms the system never assembled into a navigable whole.

The same pattern appears outside the clinic. The global wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024.

Run clubs have become social infrastructure, with new Strava clubs growing sharply and social connection cited as a leading motivator for exercise. Sober-curious culture has turned the non-alcoholic beer market into a fast-growing category, not because people stopped wanting ritual, but because many wanted the occasion without the alcohol. The rise of wearable devices follows a similar logic. Millions of people now begin their day by checking sleep scores, recovery metrics, heart-rate variability, or step counts. The data itself matters, but the deeper appeal is the ritual it creates: a daily practice of paying attention to the body. Meditation apps, too, succeeded not simply because they offered content, but because they transformed mindfulness into a repeatable habit supported by reminders, streaks, communities, and shared language. Even cold plunges, longevity protocols, and supplement stacks function this way. Their popularity cannot be explained by clinical evidence alone. They provide structure, identity, and a sense of participation in a larger project of self-transformation.

Run clubs, the morning-routine economy, sober-curious culture, and the wellness boom are not unrelated lifestyle trends. They are variations of the same behavior: people rebuilding structured, collective, repeatable practice around the body because the institutions that used to provide meaning around the body no longer do.

They are inventing rituals on their own.

The Opportunity: evidence-based rituals.

There does need to be a clear distinction between what is supported by evidence and what is not. Clinical medicine matters because it can tell us what works, for whom, and under what conditions. That foundation cannot be replaced. But wellness culture has succeeded in places where medicine often struggles: it accompanies people through everyday life. It meets them where they are. It recognizes that people do not experience themselves as organs, diagnoses, or isolated symptoms. They experience themselves in context, over time, in relationships, communities, routines, and identities.

Medicine has a great deal to teach wellness about evidence. Wellness has a great deal to teach medicine about engagement. People are more likely to sustain behaviors when those behaviors fit into a meaningful routine, when they feel understood, when they have social support, and when care connects to the realities of daily life. Better habits, stronger communities, and a greater sense of continuity are not substitutes for clinical care. They are often what make clinical care easier to follow in the first place. Adherence, after all, is not only a medical problem. It is a human one.

The wellness economy is enormous because it sells ritual without enough evidence. Clinical medicine is disengaging because it often offers evidence without enough ritual. Often times, clinical medicine fails to meet the patient where they are. Ultimately, both medicine and wellness as it currently stands, are failing people in opposite directions. When health becomes culture without evidence, the result is misinformation. When health stays clinical without culture, the result is disengagement, non-adherence, and people searching for answers elsewhere.

The opportunity sits between the two.

The next generation of health companies will not ask only what condition they treat. They will ask what transition they are helping someone live through.

That question changes everything downstream of it. What behaviors surround the transition? What language is missing? What communities already exist informally? What rituals are people inventing on their own, and what would it take to give those rituals continuity, evidence, and design?

A woman navigating menopause does not only need a fact sheet on hormone therapy. She may need a sleep ritual, a strength ritual, an intimacy ritual, a community of others crossing the same threshold, and a vocabulary for what is happening to her body. A woman on a GLP-1 does not only need a dosing schedule. She needs a way to navigate how changes in appetite, have repercussions on pleasure, identity, social settings and more.

This is also where artificial intelligence becomes interesting, if it is built around people rather than systems. Most health AI is still framed around efficiency: triage faster, document faster, route faster. Useful, but small. The larger opportunity is to connect clinical knowledge to everyday life in a form that can actually travel with the person living through the transition: symptoms, evidence, options, routines, and the lived experience of others who have crossed the same terrain.

Once health is understood this way, the boundaries of the category dissolve. Women’s health stops being only a clinical vertical and becomes a consumer category, a workplace issue, a data infrastructure problem, a longevity market, and a cultural design challenge at the same time.

The question is no longer whether health will become more cultural. It already has. The question is who will build that culture responsibly, with evidence underneath the ritual instead of in place of it.

The future of women’s health will not be built only in hospitals, labs, or apps. It will be built in the rituals of everyday life, and the institutions that learn to design for transitions, not just treat conditions, will capture the value the current system leaves on the table.

The unmet need is continuity between life and care: evidence that is medically grounded, emotionally intelligent, socially aware, and designed for the days people actually live inside.

I’ll be at Cannes Lions next week. If this essay landed for you, if you’re thinking about how health, ritual, identity, and taste are converging and what to build around it, would love to connect and discuss.
You can reach me at: oriana@femtechnology.org.