There’s now a one-stop shop in Forest Park for biohacking — the process of improving performance and health by combining traditional wellness practices and modern technology.
The inside of HEAL—Wellness + Longevity looks like a spa, but offers the use of infrared saunas, cold plunge bathtubs and a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. The facility aims to help customers, whether they have a chronic ailment or want to feel more energized, to rid the body of toxins, plus improve cardiovascular, metabolic and autoimmune health.
Oak Park resident Jam Alker, owner of HEAL, is opening the first-of-its-kind facility just blocks from where he lives after he found himself travelling to Naperville or downtown Chicago to access similar offerings. HEAL’s grand opening is on Thursday, though the location is already open to about 150 people who have signed up for one of 250 founding memberships.
HEAL’s core services are provided in its seven contrast therapy suites. First-time visitors can rent the suites for $35 an hour, and $49 a session after that. In that 60 minutes, they have access to a dry infrared sauna that heats up to 175 degrees and a rain shower with a filter that removes traces of fluoride, chlorine, pesticides and heavy metals from the village’s water. The shower has toxin-free shampoo, conditioner and body wash made in-house, plus organic cotton towels that are washed at HEAL with toxin-free products. After a shower, customers can use the suite’s cold plunge bathtub.
Alker says he usually does three rounds of the sauna, shower and cold plunge within the hour. The contrast therapy, he says, allows the body to burn a significant amount of calories when its core temperature drops, then rises, repeatedly. Alker added that the cold plunges make the body feel more energized by increasing dopamine and norepinephrine.
“You get cardiovascular benefits from you warming up so much that your body has to pump so much oxygen and so much blood to cool you down that you have a low-key cardio workout when you’re in there,” Alker said. “It’s a very luxurious, calming, peaceful experience, and you’re burning more calories than if you spent all of that time killing yourself on a treadmill.”
At the back of HEAL, there’s a “glam lab” where visitors can get ready after their time in the contrast therapy suites.
The clinic side of HEAL will be fully up and running come next month or October. It includes a wellness-grade hyperbaric oxygen chamber — which Alker says helps expand lung capacity and increase oxygen in the blood — and a red light therapy room with a pulse electromagnetic frequency map, recommended in the wellness industry to improve cellular function, boost collagen production and improve blood circulation. The clinic also includes an office for a functional medicine doctor who will work out of HEAL a couple days a week. Alker said the doctor will start offering free wellness consultations next month.
“I’m not sh*tting on traditional medicine. If you have a broken bone, if you have a heart attack, if you have a car accident, by all means go to the doctor, go to the hospital,” Alker said. “But if you talk candidly with many doctors and healthcare providers, they’re going to tell you that they are not properly trained to handle autoimmune, chronic fatigue, and chronic inflammation.”
In the middle of the HEAL building is a recovery and meeting room. Seats provide a resting place for those doing an IV drip or red light face masks. But Alker also plans to hold events in the space, including lectures or workshops.
Alker said he hopes the room can cater to “a wellness party. Rather than going to a bar, you’re actually doing something good for yourself, but in the social environment.” Last week, for example, he hosted an event with BODYBAR Pilates in Oak Park, where a coach taught meditation and breath work.
“It’s very important to me that we build community here with the whole wellness community of Oak Park, Forest Park and River Forest,” Alker said. “We very much complement what it is they’re doing with the additional recovery and wellness services that we offer here.”
Jam’s journey
Alker said he grew up exposed to trauma and violence. He started playing guitar as a teenager and later became a touring musician while working as an entrepreneur with his own real estate development company.
“The combination of the rock’n’roll lifestyle and that unresolved trauma led to a decades-long drug addiction,” Alker said. He got clean after the birth of his daughter over a decade ago and came away with a life lesson: “One of the cornerstones or foundations of my recovery has always been being of service to others . . . I felt a very strong pull towards this being the latest way that I could be of service to others, by providing this to the community.”
Service, through biohacking specifically, became even more of Alker’s mission after a chronic illness sidelined his musical career following his first major record deal with Sony. Early during the Covid-19 pandemic, Alker contracted a bacterial infection that led to chronic pain, inflammation and fatigue. He found solace in the types of remedies he offers at HEAL.
“I went to several doctors in the traditional healthcare system, and they just weren’t able to heal me. They just wanted to give me more drugs. So I decided to seek help in the holistic community instead,” Alker said. “I had a really profound healing experience when I started to incorporate these other healing modalities into my protocol.”
“I’m now 54, and I feel like I did in my 30s,” Alker added. “This is what I’m hoping to bring to the community — if some people can feel even remotely close to the way I feel now, I feel like I will have fulfilled that mission to help others.”
Alker shares the story of a new client who came on the first day HEAL was signing up founding members. He said the woman has ankylosing spondylitis, a chronic autoimmune inflammatory arthritis.
“She mentioned that she’s been in chronic pain since her childhood. There’s never been a time where she can’t remember being in pain,” Alker said. “She came back literally the next day, and she said, ‘I thought about it again, and I realized that I was 100% pain free for the first time in my adult life.’”
Alker said the woman now comes in every morning and can get through most of the day without pain.
“That is the ‘why’ behind this,” Alker said, “and why I called it HEAL.”
HEAL—Wellness + Longevity’s grand opening is Aug. 28 from 4 to 8 p.m. at 7210 Circle Park Ave.
