The following commentary follows on and flows out of an initial response to reading “Multiple Voices on Authorship and Authority in Biomedical Publications” by DeTora and colleagues (2020), which appeared in volume 3 issue 4 of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine. This response, by rhetorician of science, health, and medicine Celeste Condit, begins by situating questions about authorship and authority in biomedicine against a classical rhetorical source, Plato’s Gorgias. In so doing, Condit identifies a messy truth—that rhetoric potentially can pose dangers when applied to health and medicine. The authors then construct a Platonic dialogue that situates authorship, ethos, and authority in the context of biomedicine. Ultimately, the two authors illustrate the messiness that results when attempting to mount a discussion of these terms across intellectual registers.

This study describes and analyzes a sample of noncommercial web pages that address cancer genetic testing. These “gateway documents,” which were returned in an initial Internet search for information, may serve as the only texts that peo­ple read when deciding whether to pursue genetic testing. Deliberative rhetorical theory elaborated into dimensions of embodied knowledge and scientific knowl­edge was mapped onto problematic integration theory to create a framework for investigating the documents. Analysis reveals the contingent nature of evaluating probability in genetic testing and the intrinsic need to examine the rhetorical con­struction of gateway documents as multidimensional communication events in which disadvantages and benefits shift—and sometimes transpose—according to the embodied knowledge of each person. Benefits and disadvantages of genetic test­ing become topoi that healthcare providers should consider carefully to improve the decision-making information offered to people who are searching for online resources.

This essay takes the recent popularity of medical doctors’ narrative writings about the dying process as its cultural exigence, analyzing these alongside an earlier wave of such writings as epideictic rhetorics that function to reshape cultural values surrounding the “good death” by reconstituting our notions of virtuous dying conduct. Although the texts analyzed have many admirable and comforting qualities, encouraging us to face death with realism and assuring us that there are aspects of the way we die which are within our control, the virtues and modes of conduct they promote and exalt around a controlled death are available only to the privileged subject.

Recent work in rhetoric of science, technology, health, and medicine argues for a shift away from critique, even as some health communication scholars call for critical engagement with the situated, ideological nature of scientific claims supporting public health messages. We suggest that critique of scientific claims remains important to rhetoricians of health and medicine, but that such critique must go further in examining interactions between science, values, and public health policy. We offer an adapted version of stasis theory as a framework for pursuing this end. Using the U.S. public health nutrition policy Dietary Guidelines for Americans as a case study, we engage this framework to explore how science-based nutrition policy provides a discursive lens that influences how subsequent scientific evidence is produced, interpreted, and employed.