Crip or Cure: The Dissertation

CRIP OR CURE: A DOCUMENT-BASED NARRATIVE INQUIRY OF FOOD AS MEDICINE BOOKS FOR MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS

Amelia McNew, PhD (Nutrition)
Saybrook University, 2026

Abstract

Commercial food as medicine books for multiple sclerosis reach vulnerable populations seeking control over an unpredictable condition, yet no scholarship has systematically examined how these texts construct meaning around disability, chronic illness, and healing potential. This document-based narrative inquiry addresses this gap in understanding, guided by the research question: How do food as medicine books for multiple sclerosis perpetuate healthism and ableism through their storytelling, philosophies, and protocols? Grounded in Shakespeare's (2014) relational theory of disability and informed by crip scholarship from Clare (2017), McRuer (2006), Schalk (2018), and others, the researcher examined these texts as cultural artifacts rather than neutral health resources.

Narrative inquiry methodology with Braun and Clarke’s (2022) reflexive thematic analysis was applied to 13 commercially published MS diet books spanning 50 years (1972–2022). Purposeful criterion sampling identified influential texts authored by credentialed individuals and representing diverse dietary philosophies. The researcher’s dual positioning as nutrition scientist and disabled person functioned as methodological strength, with multiple validation strategies implemented, including theoretical triangulation, contradictory inclusion, contextualizing data extracts, resonance, and structured reflexivity.

Six interconnected themes were created after deep contextual engagement:

• (1) Follow My Science, Not My Citations—authority performed through citation distortion
• (2) Birthrights and Broken Bodies—purity logic that positions disability as contamination
• (3) No Future for the Disabled—cure as the only source of hope
• (4) The Whiplash of Wellness What-to-Do—contradictory compliance demands
• (5) Protocols for the Privileged—class-based sorting by invisible structural barriers
• (6) You Become What You Believe—individual mind as final site of blame.

A new theoretical contribution, “wellgenics,” names the ideology where health is positioned as a birthright recoverable through individualized optimization mandates—a unified belief system connecting healthism, ableism, cure ideology, and eugenic inheritance operating through the contemporary wellness ecosystem.

These findings extend disability theory into nutrition science, offering clinicians, people with MS, and scholars a framework for recognizing how eugenic logic operates through modern wellness rhetoric. Wellgenics names an ideological system that has previously been unexamined or critiqued as a unified phenomenon.