Celebrity-driven wellness ventures are pervasive and often spearheaded by white women, resulting in white-centric health guidance. One such venture is KINRGY, a workout and lifestyle method created by professional dancer Julianne Hough that regularly appropriates and exploits Eastern, Aboriginal, and BIPOC cultural practices. Through a critical rhetorical interrogation of the workout videos and Instagram feed of KINRGY, we assess how this method relies on cultural appropriation and New Age Orientalism to situate spirituality as the crux of universal health, thus establishing a reconfiguration of healthism into what we call “neohealthism”—a phenomenon that further obfuscates structural constraints on health, and expands the individual imperatives of healthful choices by placing metaphysical considerations on consumers’ shoulders. We theorize neohealthism through the following themes: the consumption of the Other via cultural exploitation, the question of expertise in spiritual leadership, and the intensified neoliberal imperatives that individualize health and wellness for self and the universe.

Women of color are more likely to experience infertility compared to white women. Despite this likelihood, infertility continues to be associated with whiteness. This study examines the historical and modern influences of the hyperfertility narrative, a pervasive master narrative linking race and reproduction. Studying Instagram posts about infertility and race, McCann argues that women of color have had to fight for their very inclusion within infertility identities, illustrating the continued rhetorical salience that dominant narratives of race and reproductive enforce within support-seeking environments like Instagram. Specifically, this study demonstrates how WOCr rhetors counter hyperfertility by co-constructingnew counternarratives that frame experiences of infertility through experiences with race and racism. These counternarratives involve three empowerment strategies: witnessing, visual counterstorying, and attribution. By studying how marginalized rhetors counter hyperfertility narratives, the study illustrates a kind of invitational knowledge-building that occurs within histories of race and reproduction. Overall, this work pushes scholars and practitioners in reproductive care to acknowledge how racial identities, and perhaps personhood itself, is de/valued around and through reproductive abilities.

The coronavirus pandemic has been widely experienced online, and the experience of COVID-19 vaccines is no exception. This article reports on a case study of social media writing authored by COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial participants as a new and innovative form of vaccine communication. Findings offer three insights about vaccine decision-making and communication: 1) vaccine refusal, confidence, and hesitancy are increasingly informed by individuals’ personal assessments of vulnerability and risk; 2) expressed vaccine hesitancy is characterized by openness to persuasion; and 3) this impressionable vaccine hesitancy can be productively addressed in spaces that bridge lived experience and medical expertise. Building on these insights, this article delineates strategies for meaningful and participatory online communication about vaccination.

This article applies the lens of genre to the social media advocacy of three patient-activists—self-identified “zebras” whose rarely diagnosed conditions are frequently comorbid—who, through performing consistent genre moves, and using the capabilities of social networking to translate personal experiences into public discourse, amplify visibility, and normalize their voices as collective advocacy. Ultimately, through networked communication, these patient-activists perform emergent connections between their conditions outside of the traditional legitimization networks of biomedicine with the aim of gaining legitimacy in public and clinical settings.

On March 10, 2019, 60 Minutes reported the development of a potentially life-altering gene therapy for Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). Despite this therapy’s potential for cure, SCD community members’ reactions ranged from skepticism to fear due to the use of deactivated HIV as a vector for transporting the corrected gene into stem cells, thus repairing the faulty gene in SCD. Using a mental models framework, we analyze how 60 Minutes attempted to explain this research and how audiences reacted on social media. Specifically, we show how 60 Minutes’ treatment of given versus new information, as well as the journalists’ failure to account for the specific audiences with the most at stake, led to misunderstandings that contributed to ongoing fear and mistrust of the scientific community. We conclude with recommendations for how journalists should approach accommodating science when that science has particular impacts on minoritized and marginalized groups.

Applying an ecological rhetorical approach, this article examines the online circulation of arguments about food choice in two seemingly disparate sites: clean, medicinal food rhetoric and the rhetoric of “food swamps.” Studying snack food conglomerate Mondelez International’s “Mindful Snacking” campaign in juxtaposition with clean eating brand Sakara Life’s “made-for-Instagram” marketing materials demonstrates how clean, medicinal food texts emerge as acts of communicative resistance to the normalization of fast and processed food, yet slip back into the same meritocratic logic emphasizing individual responsibility and ultimately reproduce the ideological conditions that maintain inequitable access to healthy food. This article concludes with suggestions for disrupting and transforming the pervasive individualizing frameworks of food choice that locate health and diet concerns in the individual as opposed to the wider political, economic, and environmental context.

Weight-inclusive approaches such as Health at Every SizeÒ (HAESÒ) that once were used primarily by scientists or other health experts are more frequently being taken up by lay audiences. Most notably, popular members of online communities known as social media influencers rely on principles of HAESÒ to spread weight-neutral rhetoric across platforms like Instagram. Analyzing how influencers domesticate, or make their own, the specific science-based principles of HAESÒ warrants exploration. In this study, I draw from an analysis of 20 Instagram accounts run by influencers to explicate how domestication occurs within the body positive and weight-inclusive community. The findings suggest three primary patterns through which domestication occurs: anecdotal narratives and personalization, science and education, and social justice. I argue these influential users domesticate HAESÒ by drawing on their own education, life experience, and personal identity while upholding the core norms of the influencer industry: authenticity and credibility.

Medical device manufacturers and other high-technology companies increasingly incorporate algorithmic data surveillance in next-generation medical wearables. These devices, including hearing aids, leverage patient data created through human-computer interaction to not only power devices but also increase corporate profits. Although data protection laws establish privacy requirements for personal information collection and use, these companies continue to use patients’ personal information with little notice or education, significantly curtailing the agency of wearers. We explore the complex ecology of the Starkey Halo smart hearing aid, focusing on the opacity of its algorithmic functionality and examining patient education materials for disclosures of data surveillance. We contextualize these findings within privacy law in the United States and European Union that are relevant to algorithmic surveillance and recommend specific steps to enhance wearer agency through informed decision-making.

Searching the Internet for health information is now routine; recommending and receiving medical expertise on social media platforms such as Instagram (IG) during medical treatment remains understudied. After analyzing more than 200 images on IG related to (in)fertility treatment, we employed a directed content analysis. In this manuscript, we investigate self- disclosure related to in vitro fertilization treatment on IG and the types of linguistic (e.g., written affirmations, hashtags) and paralinguistic (e.g., emoji) feedback given in response. We found users on IG received emotional (e.g., expressions of care), informational (e.g., medical and treatment advice), tangible (e.g., gifted medicine and care packages), and belonging (e.g., #ttcsisters) functions of social support in response to self-disclosure (Uchino, 2004). By concluding that social media platforms allow for unique social support exchanges, we offer theoretical and practical implications for scholars, practitioners, and patients interested in social support, supportive communication, and emoji on social media platforms.

With joy and gratitude, we present the first double issue of Rhetoric of Health & Medicine (RHM), the new scholarly home for the emergent multi-and inter-disciplinary field of the same name. For us, this journal’s manifestation has been a labor of love, borne out of a commitment to advance this field for its pioneers, newcomers, members-to-be, and our various (potential) interlocutors and stakeholders. Although the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) has been recognized and named as a field relatively recently (for the most comprehensive accounts of its emergence, see Meloncon & Frost, 2015; Malkowski, Scott, & Keränen, 2016), threads of its scholarship began appearing at least as early as the 1980s (see Reynolds, this volume). Further, the field’s growth has been fueled by the coalescence of community through scholarly meetings (e.g., pre-conferences, conference panels and workshops, RHM Symposium) and special interest groups (e.g., CCCC Medical Rhetoric Standing Group, ARSTM); online forums (e.g., medicalrhetoric.com; Flux Facebook group); and a surprisingly expansive network of scholars and scholarship connected through publication venues (e.g., journal special issues, edited collections, scholarly encyclopedias). RHM is truly a crowd-sourced endeavor, and we are thankful to have been entrusted with it.