Whole-life care for chronic bodies.
Chronic Wellness treats chronic illness as a full-life condition, not a narrow medical file. Annette moves between personal updates, practical symptom management, guest conversations, and wider ethical questions that matter when health is fragile.
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Chronic Wellness is a compact, personal health podcast centered on chronic illness, pain, disability, and the work of staying whole when symptoms do not politely step aside. The show is plainspoken. Annette often begins from the immediate facts of a body: a virus after specialist appointments, thrush during migraine pain, photophobia, immune suppression, exhaustion, or the frustration of waiting for doctors to space visits farther apart. From there, the episodes turn into reflections that are both practical and emotional. A discussion of thrush becomes a look at cravings, sugar, discomfort, and the strange negotiations required when a symptom changes daily life. A return after an eight-week break becomes a note on overcommitment, rest, and the planned Chronic Wellness Conversations series with physicians, authors, thought leaders, and sick people. The show also has a public conscience. It connects chronic illness to the scams around Amanda C. Reilly and Belle Gibson, asking what fraudulent cancer narratives do to people who already live under suspicion, need, and vulnerability. It pauses regular programming to think about Gaza, terrorism, peacemaking, displacement, and the specific terror of needing medication, mobility devices, safety, and medical care in a war zone. These turns are not abstract. They keep returning to bodies under pressure. The guest episodes add another register, especially the conversation with Mike Murray about body pain, hip replacement, fear, isolation, vulnerability, meditation, and his book My Pain Body Solution. Chronic Wellness does not sell triumph as a lifestyle brand. It values honesty, steadiness, and small adjustments. The pacing is brief but not shallow. Some episodes feel like a note from someone still recovering while recording. Others work like a careful conversation at the edge of grief, belief, and medical reality. The result is a show for people who need health talk that can hold pain, uncertainty, practical coping, and moral seriousness in the same room.
Made for: Chronic Wellness is for people living with chronic illness, pain, disability, immune compromise, or recurring medical uncertainty. It also suits people who want a closer view of daily life inside long-term illness.
What sets it apart: The show blends lived experience, symptom-level practicality, guest reflection, and public ethics without reducing wellness to cure language. Its strength is the way it treats medical life, emotional life, and world events as connected pressures on real bodies.
Are you one of the millions living with a chronic illness or pain? Our diseases may be very different, but we have many of the same experiences, obstacles and frustrations. We are all working for a better quality of life knowing that pain and limitations will be our traveling companions. My name is Annette and I'm the host of Chronic Wellness, a brief, weekly, podcast where we talk about it all: sex, self-care, mental heath, loss of identity, anger, how to navigate health care and have less days that suck so hard.I have this belief that: If health is the absence of disease, and wellness is the presence of wholeness; whether or not I'm ever "healthy" again, I can work work toward my wellness,…
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A candid conversation about pain, vulnerability, and the beliefs that can make suffering feel isolating.
Mike Murray's story turns three years of body pain, a hip replacement, and repeated doctor's appointments into a candid look at how suffering can shrink a life.
Beauty talk with real-life stakes.
Training, honesty, and Parkinson's in motion.
Lyme science, translated for patients.
Host Annette discusses managing thrush, a fungal infection common in immunocompromised individuals, sharing personal experiences and tips.
Mike Murray retired at 43, but three years of unexplained pain led him to uncover the emotional roots of his suffering.
Host Annette Leonard discusses her recent illness and the challenges of managing chronic conditions while dealing with additional acute illnesses.
Host Annette discusses the Scamanda and Belle Gibson scams and how they harm people with chronic and terminal illnesses.
Host Annette returns from a break to announce a new interview series on Instagram Live featuring conversations with thought leaders and physicians about living with chronic illness.