Why Wellness Sells: Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture (Health Communication) (EPUB)

Why Wellness Sells Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture

How and why wellbeing is such a damaging and rhetorical concept.

Colleen Derkatch explores why the idea of wellness has such rhetorical force in modern culture in her book Why Wellness Sells. The two opposing health philosophies that fuel public interest in wellness are enhancement, which aims to maximize wellness by optimizing the body’s systems and functions, and restoration, which uses natural health products to return people to previous states of wellness.

Why Wellness Sells examines the conflict between these two conceptions of wellness in a number of contexts, such as online activism, popular and social media, advertisements, and interviews. Derkatch looks at how wellness appears in a variety of contexts, where being “well” can mean many things. For example, it can mean being in a state of health prior to a sickness or being able to act as a responsible consumer, being physically or morally cleansed or being nourished and cared for, or harm reduction or optimization. Derkatch shows along the way that while the concept of wellness may offer access to the beautiful life, it is essentially a coping mechanism for a terrible and overwhelming present.

Derkatch provides a sophisticated explanation of how language, belief, behavior, experience, and persuasion come together to create and promote wellness—one of the most powerful and damaging ideas guiding modern Western life—by drawing on research in the rhetoric of health and medicine, the health and medical humanities, and related fields. She explains that because wellness is a constantly evolving and hence unrealistic objective, it has become so prevalent in the US and Canada. While collectivist techniques might more readily serve the health and well-being of entire communities, the concept of wellness firmly establishes an individualist paradigm of health as a personal duty.