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.