Health Inc. Seminar Series Why Wellness Sells

  • Mar 5
    Noon-1pm

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How the idea of wellness drives markets in invisible ways

Featuring Colleen Derkatch, Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University

March 5, 2025 | 12 PM – 1 PM EST | Online via Zoom

The idea of wellness is particularly powerful in contemporary culture and the emphasis on individuals to maintain and optimize their health and mitigate risks received renewed emphasis through and following the COVID-19 pandemic. The pursuit of wellness has spawned an industry marketing natural health products, including supplements and other therapies positioned in contrast to medicines produced by the pharmaceutical industry and serving as the key tools of biomedicine. In this seminar, we will discuss why wellness sells, drawing from humanities scholarship on the rhetoric of health and wellness, and examining the self-generating arguments that work to promote and sustain wellness-seeking behaviours. Though not immediately visible, these arguments work to drive markets and shape consumption patterns and how people think about their risk, health, and what it means to be well.

Recommended readings:

Derkatch, Colleen. (2022). Why wellness sells: Natural health in a pharmaceutical culture. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Derkatch, C., & Homchick Crowe, J. (2023). Supplements as symbols: Public arguments against natural health product regulation in Canada. SSM – Qualitative Research in Health, vol. 4, 100358. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmqr.2023.100358

Presenter Bio: Colleen Derkatch is Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Dr. Derkatch’s research and teaching focus on rhetorical theory and criticism, particularly rhetoric of science, health, and medicine, as well as the health humanities and science and technology studies. Her research program emphasizes understanding “in-between” spaces in health and health discourse, such as spaces between medical research and practice, mainstream and non-dominant models of health care, doctors and patients, and expert and public understandings of evidence.

She is the author of Why Wellness Sells: Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2016).