This Is What It's Like to Check Into the World's Most Expensive Rehab Center

Philip Ellis

July 12, 2020 2:25 PM

High Society, a webseries from VICE, explores different aspects of drug-taking in our culture. In a recent episode, host Sydney Lima checked into Paracelsus, a rehab facility in Switzerland that caters to a clientele of celebrities, oligarchs, royalty, and CEOs.

This Is the World's Most Expensive Rehab Center

Sydney, a writer and model from London, has found it hard to stop using drugs as she says it is so "normalized" in her profession and peer group, and she hopes that a short stay in the priciest rehab on the planet might be able to help her. She is greeted at the airport by her own personal driver and a Bentley, and is taken to the luxury penthouse apartment, complete with a live-in cook and live-in therapist, where she will undergo treatment.

"We do, in a way, create a kind of symbolic family," says the in-house therapist Louis.

After her first session with Louis, Sydney heads to her next appointment: biochemical restoration, which uses bio-resonance technology to test her for allergies and intolerances prior to changing her diet, followed by a "Metatron" screening procedure. "I had never experienced or heard of anything like these tests," she says. "I just feel like when you're in a desperate position, as an addict coming here, you will take these bio-resonance tests and not question them, when maybe you should."

Other procedures include intermittent hypoxic therapy, cupping therapy, and acupuncture none of which, the practitioners admit, are really applicable to treating addiction. "I'm beginning to feel sceptical about how any of these treatments and lifestyle changes are really going to help overcome any real issues," says Sydney.

On the second day, Sydney is driven to the off-site spa, where she has a series of treatments including a hot stone bath and a short spell in an ice room, which is exactly what it sounds like.

"This does feel like the antidote to unhealthy sesh living," she says, adding: "But also what you might use to refresh and get right back on it the next day."

Philip Ellis