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."

Click on the link below for more:

Why the Gospel of Wellness Sells

Forensic (Pseudo) Science

"Under Obama, a commission called the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology researched and wrote a 2016 report called Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods which found many techniques, such as bite mark and shoe print analysis, so devoid of foundational validity they should be prohibited. But what was to be done with these findings would be left to the Trump administration. What that turned out to be was that the Obama commission's charter was allowed to immediately expire; the new Attorney General outright dismissed their report and said it would not be adopted; and Trump's own forensic science review was announced, which consisted of one former prosecutor hired to write one release stating the Obama report was in error and should be ignored. As of this writing, that's where we remain today."

Click on this link to understand just how bad so-called forensic science is, no thanks to the Trump administration, of course.