“They were simply looking for something that would bring in fresh money without involving any insurance fund.” A professor who studies healthcare economics and has in-depth knowledge of the development of Greece’s “wellness” and “longevity” market uses this phrase to describe the financial incentive behind a rapidly expanding activity in the country: the booming market for services and alternative treatments promising to “regenerate” the body and preserve youth and longevity.
The market is growing at an estimated annual rate of 17.5% globally and is expected to reach $600 billion within three years.
As private healthcare entrepreneurs told TO BHMA, it is extremely difficult to quantify the economic footprint of these activities in Greece. However, data from the Hellenic Statistical Authority offer an initial picture of the market’s scale.
A ‘statistical umbrella’
In 2023, the broad NACE category 86.90, “Other human health activities,” included 18,942 legal entities, 48,917 employees and total turnover of approximately €1.45 billion.
The figure does not, of course, represent the “turnover of longevity,” since the category is a broad “statistical umbrella” covering a range of different healthcare services that have no connection to medicine or pharmaceuticals. It does, however, indicate the size of the pool in which many newer activities are developing.
The recently defined category 86.96, “Traditional, complementary and alternative medicine activities,” also falls within this broader category. This is not a Greek invention, but rather ELSTAT’s alignment with European requirements.
The amounts being spent on some of these additional and alternative services become more tangible when looking at the market itself. In Athens, a wellness company advertises three longevity programs lasting between four and seven hours, priced at €2,300 to €4,850. If a “genomics and epigenetics” program is included, the cost rises to €6,600.
In Thessaloniki and Katerini, meanwhile, IV wellness treatments are priced from €120, while intravenous administration of NAD+ — nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, a substance involved in cellular metabolism — starts at €150.
This is a significant market attracting new organized investments in specialized facilities operating as multispecialty medical centers, while a much broader ecosystem of smaller providers is also emerging, many of whom have no connection to licensed healthcare professionals.
Estimates therefore put the total value of this market, including informal payments, at more than €1 billion in Greece.
In villas and on yachts
Under the same commercial umbrella, vastly different services are being offered, ranging from preventive care, genetic testing and personalized nutrition to infusions, “detox” treatments, hyperbaric oxygen and many other interventions.
“These wellness and longevity vitamins you hear about are not ordinary vitamins. They are specialized formulations prepared in compounding pharmacies and administered intravenously,” lawyer Evangelos Katsikis, who has previously handled similar cases, told TO BHMA.
There is also an additional, much harder-to-measure part of this economy: services delivered directly to customers.
A typical example can be found on the island of Mykonos, where mobile IV therapies are advertised for hangovers, jet lag or exhaustion, with practitioners traveling to hotels, villas, private homes or even yachts.
The trend appears to have started on the island with so-called hangover drips and gradually expanded into a broader range of intravenous services.
No regulatory framework
At the same time, the new European NACE 2.1 classification separately records “traditional, complementary and alternative medicine activities.” Category 86.96 includes, among other services, acupuncture, herbal medicine, homeopathy and reflexology.
This is where one of the market’s paradoxes emerges: the state can recognize an economic activity for tax and statistical purposes without having established a unified regulatory framework governing how it is practiced.
A Business Activity Code, or KAD, allows an activity to be recorded, but it does not, by itself, constitute a license for every individual procedure, nor does it determine who is authorized to perform it.
“Whatever existed abroad, whether equipment or a trend, they tried to bring it to Greece,” an executive at a multispecialty medical center told TO BHMA. “But the institutional framework is not simply a gray area. It is nonexistent…”
The Health Ministry, however, has announced the creation of a special committee to address the regulatory framework.
The current ambiguity even extends to the terminology businesses use in their marketing.
“The term ‘clinic’ should be used only for private hospitals, meaning secondary healthcare facilities,” Katsikis said.
He explained that the English term “clinic” is used “on signs, advertisements and so on” for doctors’ offices or unrelated facilities, even though its use in such cases is clearly prohibited.
This is how a multi-tiered market is taking shape. On one side are organized investments, multispecialty medical centers, doctors, geneticists, advanced diagnostics and evidence-based preventive medicine. On the other is a rapidly expanding field where terms such as “longevity,” “anti-aging,” “regenerative” and “functional medicine” can serve as powerful commercial tools without scientific evidence or established clinical application.
