Rethinking Culture in Health Communication An interdisciplinary overview of health communication using a cultural lens—uniquely focused on social interactions in health contexts Patients, health professionals, and policymakers embody cultural constructs that impact healthcare processes. Rethinking Culture in Health Communication explores the ways in which culture influences healthcare, introducing new approaches to understanding social relationships and health policies as a dynamic process involving cultural values, expectations, motivations, and behavioral patterns. This innovative textbook integrates theories and practices in health communication, public health, and medicine to help students relate fundamental concepts to their personal experiences and develop an awareness of how all individuals and groups are shaped by culture. The authors present a foundational framework explaining how cultures can be understood from four perspectives—Magic Consciousness, Mythic Connection, Perspectival Thinking, and Integral Fusion—to examine existing theories, social norms, and clinical practices in health-related contexts. Detailed yet accessible chapters discuss culture and health behaviors, interpersonal communication, minority health and healthcare delivery, cultural consciousness, social interactions, sociopolitical structure, and more. The text features examples of how culture can create challenges in access, process, and outcomes of healthcare services and includes scenarios in which individuals and institutions hold different or incompatible ethical views. The text also illustrates how cultural perspectives can shape the theoretical concepts emerged in caregiver-patient communication, provider-patient interactions, social policies, public health interventions, and other real-life settings. Written by two leading health communication scholars, this textbook: Highlights the sociocultural, interprofessional, clinical, and ethical aspects of health communication Explores the intersections of social relationships, cultural tendencies, and health theories and behaviors Examines the various forms, functions, and meanings of health, illness, and healthcare in a range of cultural contexts Discusses how cultural elements in social interactions are essential to successful health interventions Includes foundational overviews of health communication and of culture in health-related fields Discusses culture in health administration, moral values in social policies, and ethics in medical development Incorporates various aspects and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic as a cultural phenomenon through the lens of health communication Rethinking Culture in Health Communication is an ideal textbook for courses in health communication, particularly those focused on interpersonal communication, as well as in cross-cultural communication, cultural phenomenology, medical sociology, social work, public health, and other health-related fields.

Rethinking Culture in Health Communication An interdisciplinary overview of health communication using a cultural lens—uniquely focused on social interactions in health contexts Patients, health professionals, and policymakers embody cultural constructs that impact healthcare processes. Rethinking Culture in Health Communication explores the ways in which culture influences healthcare, introducing new approaches to understanding social relationships and health policies as a dynamic process involving cultural values, expectations, motivations, and behavioral patterns. This innovative textbook integrates theories and practices in health communication, public health, and medicine to help students relate fundamental concepts to their personal experiences and develop an awareness of how all individuals and groups are shaped by culture. The authors present a foundational framework explaining how cultures can be understood from four perspectives—Magic Consciousness, Mythic Connection, Perspectival Thinking, and Integral Fusion—to examine existing theories, social norms, and clinical practices in health-related contexts. Detailed yet accessible chapters discuss culture and health behaviors, interpersonal communication, minority health and healthcare delivery, cultural consciousness, social interactions, sociopolitical structure, and more. The text features examples of how culture can create challenges in access, process, and outcomes of healthcare services and includes scenarios in which individuals and institutions hold different or incompatible ethical views. The text also illustrates how cultural perspectives can shape the theoretical concepts emerged in caregiver-patient communication, provider-patient interactions, social policies, public health interventions, and other real-life settings. Written by two leading health communication scholars, this textbook: Highlights the sociocultural, interprofessional, clinical, and ethical aspects of health communication Explores the intersections of social relationships, cultural tendencies, and health theories and behaviors Examines the various forms, functions, and meanings of health, illness, and healthcare in a range of cultural contexts Discusses how cultural elements in social interactions are essential to successful health interventions Includes foundational overviews of health communication and of culture in health-related fields Discusses culture in health administration, moral values in social policies, and ethics in medical development Incorporates various aspects and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic as a cultural phenomenon through the lens of health communication Rethinking Culture in Health Communication is an ideal textbook for courses in health communication, particularly those focused on interpersonal communication, as well as in cross-cultural communication, cultural phenomenology, medical sociology, social work, public health, and other health-related fields.

This book links the growing connections between media, culture and religion into a coherent theoretical whole. It examines, amongst others, the effect on cultural practices and the increasing autonomy and individualized practice of religion.

The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication brings together the current body of scholarly work in health communication. With its expansive scope, it offers an introduction for those new to this area, summarizes work for those already learned in the area, and suggests avenues for future research on the relationships between communicative processes and health/health care delivery. This second edition of the Handbook has been organized to reflect the goals of health communication: understanding to make informed decisions and to promote formal and informal systems of care linked to health and well-being. It emphasizes work in such areas as barriers to disclosure in family conversations and medical interactions, access to popular media and advertising, and individual searches online for information and support to guide decisions and behaviors with health consequences. This edition also adds an overview of methods used in health communication and the unique challenges facing health communication researchers applying traditional methods to efforts to gain reliable and valid evidence about the role of communication for health. It introduces the promise of translational research being conducted by health communication researchers from multiple disciplines to form transdisciplinary theories and teams to increase the well-being of not only humans but the systems of care within their nations. Arguably the most comprehensive scholarly resource available for study in this area, the Routledge Handbook of Health Communication serves an invaluable role and reference for students, researchers, and scholars doing work in health communication.

Assembles the most important theories in the field of health communication in one comprehensive volume, designed for students and practitioners alike Health Communication Theory is the first book to bring together the theoretical frameworks used in the study and practice of creating, sending, and receiving messages relating to health processes and health care delivery. This timely volume provides easy access to the key theoretical foundations on which health communication theory and practice are based. Students and future practitioners are taught how to design theoretically-grounded research, interventions, and campaigns, while established scholars are presented with new and developing theoretical frameworks to apply to their work. Divided into three parts, the volume first provides a summary and history of the field, followed by an overview of the essential theories and concepts of health communication, such as Problematic Integration Theory and the Cultural Variance Model. Part Two focuses on interpersonal communication and family interaction theories, provider-patient interaction frameworks, and public relations and organizational theories. The final part of the volume centers on theories relevant to information processing and cognition, affective impact, behavior, message effects, and socio-psychology and sociology. Edited by two internationally-recognized experts with extensive editorial and scholarly experience, this first-of-its-kind volume: Provides original chapters written by a group of global scholars working in health communication theory Covers theories unique to interpersonal and organizational contexts, and to health campaigns and media issues Emphasizes the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of health communication research Includes overviews of basic health communication theory and application Features commentary on future directions in health communication theory Health Communication Theory is an indispensable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying health communication, and for both new and established scholars looking to familiarize themselves with the area of study or seeking a new theoretical frameworks for their research and practice.

The culture-centred approach offered in this book argues that communication theorizing ought to locate culture at the centre of the communication process such that the theories are contextually embedded and co-constructed through dialogue with the cultural participants. The discussions in the book situate health communication within local contexts by looking at identities, meanings and experiences of health among community members, and locating them in the realm of the structures that constitute health. The culturecentred approach foregrounds the voices of cultural members in the co-constructions of health risks and in the articulation of health problems facing communities. Ultimately, the book provides theoretical and practical suggestions for developing a culture-centred understanding of health communication processes.

​The goal of this open access book is to develop an approach to clinical health care ethics that is more accessible to, and usable by, health professionals than the now-dominant approaches that focus, for example, on the application of ethical principles. The book elaborates the view that health professionals have the emotional and intellectual resources to discuss and address ethical issues in clinical health care without needing to rely on the expertise of bioethicists. The early chapters review the history of bioethics and explain how academics from outside health care came to dominate the field of health care ethics, both in professional schools and in clinical health care. The middle chapters elaborate a series of concepts, drawn from philosophy and the social sciences, that set the stage for developing a framework that builds upon the individual moral experience of health professionals, that explains the discontinuities between the demands of bioethics and the experience and perceptions of health professionals, and that enables the articulation of a full theory of clinical ethics with clinicians themselves as the foundation. Against that background, the first of three chapters on professional education presents a general framework for teaching clinical ethics; the second discusses how to integrate ethics into formal health care curricula; and the third addresses the opportunities for teaching available in clinical settings. The final chapter, "Empowering Clinicians", brings together the various dimensions of the argument and anticipates potential questions about the framework developed in earlier chapters.