The Field of Health Communication: An Overview

Health communication is a relatively ‘young’ discipline within communication studies that studies the role of human and mediated communication in achieving a health-related outcome. The opening chapter looks at its history and growth before turning to the larger area of communication. The evolution of communication from a skill in rhetoric to mass-mediated information dissemination and persuasion is insightful for the way health communication is practised and understood. After discussing some key health communication approaches, this introductory chapter summarises the aim of the book, namely, to look at health communication as a dynamic process filtered by individual and social prisms that create complexity of health behaviour determinants, which in turn requires a variation of communicative interventions.