Author and rhetoric professor Colleen Derkatch joins us to discuss why wellness sells (and her new book by that name), how wellness culture promises an alternative to the biomedical/pharmaceutical model but fails to deliver, why it’s important to acknowledge that certain aspects of wellness culture are helpful to people even as we critique its harms, and more.

Colleen Derkatch is Associate Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the author of Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine (University of Chicago Press) and Why Wellness Sells: Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press). Her Twitter handle is @ColleenDerkatch.

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