Wellness: Another Word That Should Raise The Skeptical Antenna

"I read two books about the wellness industry this year: Rina Raphael’s The Gospel of Wellness and Colleen Derkatch’s Why Wellness Sells. These two tomes pull the façade off of this $4.4-trillion wellness economy to interrogate the self-empowerment it sells. Raphael’s book, meant for a lay audience of women, weaves her own adventures in wellness with quotes from experts, who shine a scientific light on the chemophobia of the beauty product business and the supplement recommendations of wellness influencers. (Full disclosure: I was interviewed for a tiny section of the book that deals with functional medicine and have two sentences quoted in there.) Derkatch’s volume, meanwhile, is aimed at an academic audience. It analyzes the language and arguments of wellness and how, for all of its posturing against pharmaceuticals, wellness often relies on the same sickness model and marketing style that medicine uses."

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Why the Gospel of Wellness Sells