Back to the Roots: Using Health Communication to Connect

This final chapter closes the arc by suggesting approaches that address and possibly help to resolve the intricacies of human communication. The interdisciplinary field of study of health humanities emerges as beneficial scholarly and practical discipline for improving communication in health. It achieves this because it looks at health communication from the receiver’s perspective, trying to understand why people normalise ‘unhealthy’ or ‘risky’ practices and endorse values other than biomedical health. Next, social practice theories are an avenue to move away from the typical binary classifications of a health behaviour into a more nuanced perspective by embracing the complexity and diversity experienced in everyday life. Finally, the chapter ends on the nascent approach of narrative study and storytelling in health communication which provides audiences with vivid, entertaining health stories that people more readily engage with than data and quantitative risk lists. It is considered useful as involving communication does not just create innovative and sustainable interventions, but it also promotes health empowerment and increases the attractiveness of self-management of health and illness among different target groups.