The sauna at Lolu
Green grapes and orange citrus spill across a folding table outside Lolu, the East Nashville bathhouse that opened in the winter underneath a hot-yoga studio on Main Street. Beautiful half-naked people mill around chatting with old friends and sauna acquaintances. Some sip coffee from Subliminal, a one-man espresso operation set up in Lolu’s minimalist lobby. A few relaxed deltoids — including that of Lolu co-founder Chirag Challa — sport colored Band-Aids where they were just pricked with a shot of vitamin B12 from a parking-lot pop-up booth. It’s 80 degrees in this urban Eden, though each body’s temperature might be coming up (from the custom 20-person Lolu cold bath kept around 45 degrees) or down (from a session sitting on the dry sauna’s wood bleachers, where temperatures hover between 175 and 195 degrees).
“I’ve seen her get over 200,” Challa says proudly.
Thermoregulation is among the most basic functions of the human body. People across the world have packed into saunas and plunged into ice water for millennia, particularly in Nordic countries. (Nashville’s Lolu derives its name from the Finnish word löyly, describing the steam evaporating off a sauna’s hot rocks.) Slavic peoples have long relied on bathhouses. Hot springs anchor famed Japanese onsens. Mineral-rich thermal waters dot the African continent. Though Americans may encounter saunas or steam rooms at country clubs and YMCAs, the country as a whole has been slower to adopt such therapies, stereotypically the territory of retirees with insufficient towel coverage.
That has changed.
“ We’re not reinventing anything,” says Evan Galante, another co-founder of Lolu. “Our North Star at Lolu is building a healthier community and helping our community live longer.
“Let’s look at the core principles and tenets of blue zones throughout the world,” he continues, referring to regions where people are believed to live longer, healthier lives. “A healthy lifestyle. Eating mostly plants. And social connection is a huge part of that.”
Mindfulness practices, a steady fitness regimen, meditation and guided breathwork led Galante to a personal sauna and cold plunge practice as he gradually shifted focus away from a demanding music industry schedule. Backyard “ice camps” organized by Galante and friends grew to dozens of regular attendees over 18 months in 2022 and 2023. Together, strangers and friends submerged their bodies in freezing water maintained by 2,000 pounds of ice Galante picked up from a wholesaler downtown for each session. They became natural meeting places, spinning off values about living well, limiting alcohol, exercising and mental health.
Before we speak, Galante bookmarks his page in Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life behind Lolu’s front desk.
“I’ve never done a B12 shot, I’ve never done an IV drip — I just don’t naturally gravitate towards the biohacking practices,” Galante says when asked about the day’s syringe offering. “I lean towards natural practices and the simplest forms of wellness.”
Just as Lolu has brought glamour and social life to long-established wellness practices, new businesses embracing alternative medical therapies have established a lucrative grip on Nashville — particularly among those who are wealthy, healthy and young. Hot and cold regulation, used for relaxation and muscle recovery or combined in quick succession as “contrast therapy,” is among the most accessible and common examples. Subjecting the body to extreme temperature changes forces increased blood circulation and aids muscle repair, complementing fitness practices like CrossFit or Pilates that have been widely adopted here in the past decade.
Cold plunge pool at Lolu
Saunas and cold therapy have little to prove. They stretch the body mentally and physically, feel good and have been adopted by entire cultures across oceans and centuries. Nashville is no different. Wedgewood-Houston’s Framework health spa and Urban Sweat — the latter a four-location sauna and cold plunge studio — have celebrated grand openings in the past six months. In August, the Green Hills Family YMCA expanded its own steam room complex to keep up with exploding demand.
Other businesses have gone deeper into physical health. Often labeled as clinics or medical spas, many new storefronts have staked out the city’s wealthy enclaves, like the Gulch, the Nations and Green Hills, offering vitamins administered intravenously, hormone therapies, plasma injections and extensive biological testing. Wellness boundaries bleed into cosmetic services like botox injections and chemical peels — the latter a type of facial treatment that uses acid to remove exterior layers of skin — offered under “aesthetics,” a catchall term for procedures focused on altering physical appearance. Providers explicitly market outside the realm of traditional medicine while presenting care as cutting-edge.
From expensively decorated waiting rooms to charismatic staff and out-of-pocket experimental services, private clinics contrast sharply with the traditional medical establishment. Many unproven, expensive or habit-inducing — or all three — businesses share the “wellness” label and blur the boundaries between health, body image and beauty. Gradually, users venture deeper into the “biohacking” space mentioned by Galante, a broad term for more tightly managing one’s body via organ function, hormone levels, proteins, vitamin intake or diet, often with aid from regular testing or wearable health tech devices.
“ You need to have a clear idea of what you want before you get into something like this,” says Dr. Judson Rogers, a solo practitioner now in his fifth decade practicing internal medicine. “And the practitioner you encounter should be able to tell you what they think they will be able to do with their therapy. That’s just basic science. Otherwise you just sort of strike up a rapport with whoever’s providing the service, get used to going back over and over, and forget what you are after in the first place. Living an extra 20 years is not a result you can confirm in the short term.”
Rogers, who variously refers to experimental retail medicine as “quackery” and “flapdoodle,” names specific examples of supplements and weight-loss drugs. He explains that traditional medicine relies on hard science and statistically significant findings from double-blind controlled trials.
“ Generally, this sort of fringe stuff does not get a lot of attention in traditional medical journals, but maybe that’s because it shouldn’t,” he says. “My job is: A, trying to keep people from having strokes and heart attacks; and B, seeing them in the hospital when they do have strokes and heart attacks, despite my efforts. I don’t have enough time to investigate these therapies or to decide whether or not we should even think about them, because we’ve got our hands full with doing traditional medicine. Other people — many who are basically well or are disgusted with establishment-type medicine — are often the ones coming to these folks to get different advice.”
Nashville’s alternative medical industry has a gift in a widely held distrust and dissatisfaction with traditional health care. Americans famously spend twice as much per capita on health care as other nations, and experience poorer health outcomes. The highly profitable pharmaceutical and insurance industries leave corporations to squeeze money from individual consumers at their most desperate, creating a perverse reality shared by millions of Americans. Highly processed foods have generated a national obesity crisis. Invisible microplastics and daily chemical exposures impede the human body’s natural functions from birth.
The health-conscious young evangelize about undoing and resisting the destructive physical patterns of modern life, like hunching over a screen for hours a day or binge-drinking, an American hallmark with no more obvious epicenter than Lower Broadway. Older clients cite fears about rapid end-of-life declines, worried that they may be resigned to the same geriatric pathologies they witnessed in their parents.
“ The health care industry is designed to make massive profits managing disease and illness — there needs to be a massive shift in health care, and we are at the tip of that spear,” says Kevin Peake, co-founder and president of Next Health, a clinic with a new location in the Gulch focused on health optimization. “We’re finally at the point where the world has caught up, and awareness and demand for this has just exploded over the past 24 months. COVID drastically accelerated it — that was the first time in recent history when there was a global conversation around how important it is to optimize your health.”
Peake is a natural salesman, having steered the businesses behind the Tabañero hot sauce brand and energy drink Celsius before co-founding Next Health with Los Angeles plastic surgeon Darshan Shah. When I ask Peake what services he uses at Next Health, he doesn’t flinch.
“All of them,” he says.
Even before opening the Gulch location in April, the California-based company had additional clinics planned for Green Hills and Williamson County. Opening in Nashville was a no-brainer, says franchise owner Scott Crosbie, a lanky and outgoing entrepreneur based in Charlotte, N.C., who sought out additional health care when both his parents developed forms of dementia.
Cryo at Next Health
“ I’m sitting there going, ‘Shoot, I don’t want this to be me in 25 years,’ so I got into the biohacking movement in its infancy,” Crosbie tells the Scene by the Next Health front desk. “Big-time addicted to it. I hired a couple functional medicine specialists for blood testing, testing for heavy metals, testing for micronutrient deficiency, DNA testing. I’ve done it all. It changed everything — the way I sleep, the way I eat — and the funny thing is, I was pretty healthy before.”
Some invest purely in the promise of longevity, hoping not just to live longer lives but to live better. Nathan Byrnes, Next Health’s staff nurse, distinguishes between the body’s biological age and chronological age. The first reflects physiological health, which can be manipulated; the second is simply a tally started at birth. Fully convinced by the clinic’s technology, Byrnes shares a personal belief that his grandchildren will live past 150 years old. And they will live well.
But the term “health optimization” encompasses customized packages of injections, therapies, scans and testing that top out at the $13,500 executive physical. Marketing materials emphasize the life-saving importance of preventative testing as well as the effectiveness of a platelet-rich plasma injection for combating baldness. Here health care includes enhancing one’s quality of life, something promised by botox, testosterone replacement and Next Health’s nonsurgical butt lift.
The clinic has a private room for skin care consultations. Inside, on something like a dental X-ray machine, a high-definition camera takes an unflattering photo of your face that quickly pops up on a nearby screen. The staff specialist takes it by category: wrinkles, sun damage, surface bacteria, porphyrins, pore size. Colorful overlays highlight each flaw, which together produce an overall score from 1 to 100. The face droops and shrivels as it loses structure into a hypothetical future — your fate without Next Health’s recommended skin treatments. Or it tightens, restored by imaginary youth and a menu of acids and oils tailored to its specific needs. Familiar words combine into medical-sounding phrases like “midface correction,” “biostimulatory therapy” and “structural rejuvenation.”
VISIA Scan at Next Health
Jennifer Stieber started her own business, SLK Aesthetic Medicine, shortly after moving to Nashville from New York City in 2018. Trained as a nurse practitioner, Stieber has a calm demeanor and speaks fluently about SLK’s many products and her regular clientele. All ages and genders come through the doors. Business has been good. Two other med spas — Relive Health and Hi, Finch — operate in neighboring buildings in the Nations. Within a mile there’s ElaMar Nashville, Indie Rx, Bella Aesthetics and The Artistry, an Aesthetics House.
“In beauty, everything can be very emotional sometimes, and very tied to someone’s mental health,” Stieber says, walking through SLK’s modern, lofty space. “ An interesting fact is that our population in the skin care med spa industry has a high incidence of anxiety and depression, body dysmorphia, eating disorders — we are trained nurses, and we’re having those conversations with patients.”
Sometimes that even means turning away business, referring out to other providers or suggesting different services.
“Patients open up to us, especially because we’re working on their faces,” Stieber continues. “Sometimes getting injected isn’t the solution to all of their problems.”
Instagram and TikTok both drive business for SLK by spreading physical evidence of new treatments. Clients clamor for traditional botox injections, SLK’s No. 1 product, but Stieber also highlights the growing area of regenerative aesthetics. These treatments attempt to re-create or stimulate natural cellular growth processes via medical devices, topicals and injections. This caters to more recent desires from SLK clients.
“Five years ago, for example, patients wanted very large filled lips,” Stieber says. “Now very few patients are asking for that — in fact, we’re getting patients who have been injected for years who want their lip filler dissolved and to start from scratch. Patients are craving a more natural-looking aesthetic. They choose SLK for results that are noticeable but undetectable to another person.”
Every provider appeals to something more than just health — Lolu’s community, Next Health’s longevity, SLK’s eternal youth. These markets have followed a city that has increasingly embraced wealth and vanity over the past decade. Nashville’s expanding bourgeoisie, particularly its affluent young people, support hundreds of local businesses focused on physical health and appearance. Online influencers like neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, a hulky Stanford retina researcher, and Canadian physician Peter Attia, a longevity advocate, have built massive followings discussing “optimal” daily health habits. Strength training has become more widely adopted in recent years as more studies confirm its many health benefits, especially for women. Iconic fitness brand Equinox — whose luxury gyms are a map of the nation’s most tightly concentrated pockets of wealth — will open its first Tennessee location next door to Next Health later this year.
A growing popular understanding of health knowledge includes tips like increasing exposure to morning sunlight, maintaining regular sleep cycles and daily periods of “Zone 2 cardio,” low-intensity effort on par with a brisk stroll, steady swimming or some light cycling. Broadly, today’s health trends re-create the less sedentary lives of humans common until the past few decades. Many key elements of health “optimization” may already be understood intuitively by any dog owner or hobby gardener.
“ If it is true that people with more socioeconomic resources are the ones utilizing these services, then that is the same demographic that also has access to better health care and preventative health care services across the spectrum,” says Dr. Sandra Simmons, director of the Vanderbilt Center on Quality Aging. “ If you are that proactive about your health, seeking every possible health advantage, that tends to be correlated with other behaviors like getting your annual physical and your mammograms and your screenings. I could see where these places might sort of take credit for how healthy their clientele is.”
Simmons, a psychologist by training whose lab focuses on older adults, stresses the basics: daily physical activity, not smoking, avoiding highly processed foods.
“Many people could just go to Radnor Lake and go on a hike for free and probably do much better for themselves,” Simmons adds.
Any Lolu regular would testify that a day with a sauna and cold plunge is better than one without. For many people, the spa has built healthy routines and a valuable community, even if the $175 monthly membership shapes the sauna toward a particular high-income slice of the city. Sometimes wellness habits don’t go any further than what feels good. Sometimes they do.
Proactive steps, including spending money, can help quell anxieties. Like many medical spas and clinics, Next Health and SLK recognize that physical procedures can provide paying customers with comfort in various ways. Customers eagerly seek these external solutions to anxieties, even if it means betting on anecdotal testimony or charismatic sales pitches. Against the backdrop of America’s predatory and stagnant traditional health care system, alternatives that emphasize prevention and innovation look even better. The clear fact that such businesses are thriving suggests that results — scientific, emotional, psychological, physical or otherwise — are satisfying enough to keep customers coming back.
Back inside Lolu’s glowing sauna, another patron is desperate for relief from a sudden neurological injury. She recently returned from a consultation at Massachusetts General Hospital about deep brain stimulation surgery, an invasive procedure that is basically what it sounds like. It was an intimidating option. She hadn’t lost hope that she might recover a higher quality of life through nonsurgical methods.
After overhearing our conversation, another sauna-goer catches me on the way out. The bathhouse has become a regular part of his life.
“Everyone’s just trying to feel better,” he says, toweling off.