John Travis (physician)

In 2000, he moved to Australia, where he has continued to work in the field of adult and infant wellness. Between 2008-2016, he was an adjunct professor in the Wellness Program at RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). He is also a member of the Advisory Board, Integrative Health Studies master's degree, at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

Travis is co-founder of: Coalition for Improving Maternity Services (1996), Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children (1999), and International Coalition for Genital Integrity (1999).

Since 1991, Travis has focused on attachment parenting, connection parenting, and infant wellbeing in conjunction with Meryn Callander. In 1999 they co-founded the Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children (aTLC). He has criticized the practice of male infant circumcision, voicing support for the principle of body integrity for young males and challenging the legality of parental decision making in relation to circumcision.

Between 1975 and 1979 he opened and ran the Wellness Resource Center in Mill Valley, California. He closed the Center in 1979 and established Wellness Associates, a non-profit educational corporation.

The Illness-Wellness Continuum is a graphical illustration of a wellbeing concept first proposed by Travis in 1972. It proposes that wellbeing includes mental and emotional health, as well as the presence or absence of illness.

Travis began developing his Continuum in 1972 and it was first published in 1975 in the Wellness Inventory. Since then the concept has been applied to fields such as medicine, nursing, counseling, physical therapy, public health, and organizational development.

Travis earned his BA from The College of Wooster in 1965, followed by an MD from Tufts University School of Medicine in 1969, and spent six years as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS). At this time, he completed a residency in preventive medicine at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which included a Masters in Public Health, awarded in 1971.

John W. Travis is an American author and medical practitioner. He is a proponent of the alternative medicine concept of "wellness", originally proposed in 1961 by Halbert L. Dunn, and has written books on the subject. In the 1970s, Travis founded the first "wellness center" in California. He originated the Illness–Wellness Continuum.

Travis has cited Halbert L. Dunn's 1961 book, High-Level Wellness as one of the influences which led him to found the Wellness Resource Center. The Center focused on the individual’s overall state of wellbeing and encouraged “self-directed approaches” to improving health. In 1975, he self-published the Wellness Inventory. This utilized a whole-person model, based on a "Wellness Energy System" that comprised 12 dimensions, incorporating nutrition, exercise, stress, and the social environment. He first wrote and self-published the Wellness Workbook in 1977. This was later re-published in collaboration with Regina Ryan, and had sold 175,000 copies by 2005. In 1979 he was interviewed by Dan Rather on 60 Minutes, which helped to bring the concept of wellness to national attention.