Special Issue Editors' Introduction, Rhetoric of Chronicity

As wearable medical technologies take on an increasingly prominent role in how health care is delivered, pressure to make the development process for such devices shorter increases. This case study will recount one attempt at a do-it-yourself (DIY) development process and collaborative usability testing. I argue that these efforts can complement traditional usability methods used in the development process of a wearable diabetes technology and provide more immediate access to technologies that can meet the diverse needs of end users. The case involves an open source DIY project developed by parents of children with type 1 diabetes in order to remotely monitor the blood sugar levels of their children.

This article offers an empirical study of literature in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and the medical humanities (MH). Article traces the topics, funding mechanisms, research methods, theoretical frameworks, evidence types, audience, discourse arrangement patterns, and action orientation that constitute the scholarship in the sample to offer a landscape of the current state of RHM and the MH. Findings can be leveraged to assess the potential for alignment between these fields for future research.

Health literacy is an embodied, multisensory experience that is invariably mediated by healthcare technologies. We illustrate this concept through three case studies that describe scenarios in which non-experts and lay experts engage in non-discursive literacy practices: parents caring for an infant in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) self-managing their treatment, and public audiences reporting symptoms to a crowd-sourced flu-tracking program.

Business communication evolves and adapts to suit the times, and today’s workplace documents are increasingly multimodal. Therefore, business and professional communication specialists need to adapt to a new media workplace ecology—one that requires proficiencies with technologies such as video production, digital animation, and sound. Business and professional writing teachers, in turn, need to adopt teaching methods that include working with evolving technologies and be willing to teach multimodal skills to students. In this article I offer a case study of a flipped learning pedagogy to teach multimodal skills in the professional writing classroom.

Living with global terrorism, global epidemics, and new medical technologies has made risk a dominant theme in the 21st century in terms of both individual action and public policy.This condition has led us to become more occupied with debating, preventing, and managing risks.Risk Society, 1996 Any time we read or watch the news, the global, scientifically saturated nature of the world becomes apparent.Current events pertaining to medical risks in particular have become increasingly significant.Take, for example, the recent Ebola situation in which we have witnessed how infectious disease threat and communication of risk ignite and stoke public frenzy about how to act and whom to blame.Think of the news coverage on whether the "infected Dallas nurse and other innocent bystanders vulnerable to contracting Ebola.Also consider the treatment politically issuedwent for a bike ride.Perceptions of harm get encased in public talk where case scenario" storylines not only dominate and d but also lead to action.In this regard, and in response to her quarantine orders specifically, the

When I bought my first Mac I was frustrated by the lack of instructional documentation in my shiny new box. I found myself regularly going online to look for help in the form of PDFs or videos. A company professionally produced these instructional "texts". Enter the webcam, the iPhone, and a host of websites to upload user-generated content, and we increasingly see end users becoming produsers, individuals whom produce as well as consume information.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that 86% of Internet users living with a disability or chronic illness have looked for health information online (Fox, 2007). And while so-called e-patients often start this search for information, many find themselves led to communities that provide this and more, such as Tu Diabetes, an online social network site. This pause in what can seem like an endless search for answers may be one that health professionals can gain insight from. Such extended pauses may give insight into the values of this particular community. This article provides the results and analysis of a study using ethnographic methods and rhetorical analysis to examine the texts posted by members of the social networking site Tu Diabetes in order to discern the values held by this community.