Overview
“Biohacking” is a marketing term that refers to commercialized health trends which repackage health and wellness paradigms with the aesthetics of sophisticated technical optimization.
One of the problems with health and wellness fields is that the ultimate arbiter for the success of any particular practice is the human whose mind-body is being evaluated. If someone is absolutely convinced that a cold water plunge makes them feel better, it becomes true through the strength of the belief alone. After all, they might become quite distressed if they aren’t able to keep up that routine. The mind-body system is also incredibly complex with a lot of reasonable disagreement over the interpretation of different measurements, so it’s possible to find some type of evidence for almost any claim provided you’re willing to look far enough and back enough. It’s very easy to promote correlations between different biometrics as a causal connection, and there’s ample incentive for media institutions to lean into sensationalism over scientific literacy.