In Why Wellness Sells, Colleen Derkatch examines why the concept of wellness holds such rhetorical power in contemporary culture. Public interest in wellness is driven by two opposing philosophies of health that cycle into and amplify each other:
- Restoration, where people use natural health products to restore themselves to prior states of wellness.
- Enhancement, where people strive for maximum wellness by optimizing their body's systems and functions.
Derkatch demonstrates that the idea of wellness may promise access to the good life, but it serves primarily as a strategy for coping with a devastating and overwhelming present.
Drawing on scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine, the health and medical humanities, and related fields, Derkatch offers a nuanced account of how language, belief, behavior, experience, and persuasion collide to produce and promote wellness, one of the most compelling and harmful concepts that govern contemporary Western life. She explains that wellness has become so pervasive in the United States and Canada because it is an ever-moving, and thus unachievable, goal.
The concept of wellness entrenches an individualist model of health as a personal responsibility when collectivist approaches would more readily serve the health and well-being of whole populations.
The book is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.