East Longmeadow, MA Health and Fitness

When Kathleen Duffy founded Herbarium in 1978, she'd never worked in a shop before. Luckily, a tight-knit network of friends and family were on hand to support her. An aunt donated a cash register, and a cousin with retail experience taught her to use it. After Kathleen learned from trial and error that 5 pounds of herbs could fill a small container or an entire bathtub, depending on the plant, friends begged her to buy a calculator to use while ordering supplies. Eventually, even her customers pitched in, offering everything from suggestions for organizing the store to calligraphy labels for the bulk herbs. As her business took off, Kathleen—a former critical-care nurse—became more and more curious about how herbal treatments worked in the body. She began studying constantly, testing out new cures on herself and her family, and taking classes everywhere from the Gaia Institute to Harvard Medical School. In 1990, she turned over the shop to her daughter Andrea to focus on her studies full time, earning her certification as a clinical aromatherapist in 1999. Today, Kathleen still takes time out of her hospital-teaching schedule to personally train all of the staff members at Herbarium. Under Andrea's attentive eye, these herbal gurus guide customers through shelves stocked with aromatherapy products, potpourri, bath salts, and glycerin soap as well as natural remedies.

At Cosmetic and Wellness Center, the team of doctors has a suite of laser technologies at the ready. These laser technologies make procedures, such as body shaping and anti-aging treatments, much less invasive. The Elite laser has customizable wavelengths, spot sizes, and pulse durations that give greater flexibility to adapt laser hair removal and vein treatments to each clients' skin types, and the RevLite SI Q-Switched Nd:YAG laser can deliver up to 1.6 Joules of energy to difficult-to-remove, multi-colored tattoos.

Treating clients from face to foot, the team works to meet clients' goals for a smoother body with Smartlipo and SmoothShapes, and smoother skin using Botox and dermal fillers such as Radiesse and Juvederm. To augment treatment outcomes, the doctors recommend Jan Marini skin products, which are powered by ingredients including coenzyme Q and reservatrol.

Below the red-and-blue logo of Holistic Retreat & Institute floats the phrase, "Learn, heal, grow," underscoring the center's commitment to making health and education accessible to all. Founder Dr. Alya Shabunin provides a diverse range of holistic and educational services to help her patients make lifestyle changes that can bring about overall wellness. She leads cancer-prevention educational programs, heads up holistic retreats, and guides patients through whole-body detoxification, which can induce weight loss more easily than removing several teeth. She also holds free weekly seminars to raise awareness about disease prevention, proper nutrition, and stress reduction.

Every spa treatment, class, and wellness consultation at Sweet Serenity aims to cultivate overall well-being, addressing both external and internal wellness. Facials and body treatments rely on an arsenal of organic, botanical-based, and seasonally produced products as they cleanse and hydrate the skin. Yoga and guided-meditation sessions, meanwhile, seek to bolster self-awareness, whereas therapeutic massages work to shoo away tension and spies masquerading as muscle knots with gentle and firm pressure.

The staff members at Core Fitness lead circuit-training fitness classes as well as personal-training sessions. During the group classes, the trainers challenge their students with upper body, lower body, core, cardio, balance, and strength exercises on 12 to 16 different stations.