Newsflash:  Someone from Johnson & Johnson named Michael Schmidt responded to our posting that the HERO Report shows wellness loses money.  This is the first time anyone associated with HERO has strayed from the tried-and-true Wellness Ignorati strategy of ignoring us.  We were concerned that he might have found a mistake in our math, which no one has ever done.

Fortunately, our math is OK with Mr. Schmidt, and — by implication, since he is writing on their URL — J&J itself. His point is different. He argues that we write these columns to do the following:  generate business.  Touche!

He also says that the headline is inflammatory and that we will turn off more people than we turn on.  That is probably accurate. However, the people we would turn off — traditional “pry, poke, prod and punish” wellness vendors such as Johnson & Johnson — have had and would have no interest in paying us to find out that wellness is worthless.

In any event the headline “The Wellness Wars Are Over. Wellness Lost” captures exactly what the HERO report says — and was edited by the ITL editor.  Headlines, as Mitt Romney found out when his New York Times op-ed was entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” are the purview of the editor, not the author.

The curious thing is, Johnson & Johnson is listed as one of the “endorsers” of the HERO report.  So as an endorser of the report, Johnson & Johnson is tacitly nonetheless acknowledging that the report is right–wellness loses money.

In case there is some ambiguity, here is the screenshot of the first set of comments