Medical Communication: From Theoretical Model To Practical Exploration. Tao Wang
Occasionally, the lack of the knowledge mentioned above could be fatal. There was a real case. A patient with a history of coronary heart disease immediately dialed 120 emergency calls during a myocardial infarction and 120 ambulance departed in time. But in the end, because of the neglect of some details, the best rescue time was delayed. It turned out that the patient had just moved to a new community that implemented “human-car diversion” and the address provided by the patient on the phone was the pedestrian entrance, not the entrance to the car. The golden rescue time was delayed for a few minutes to re-find the entrance. Communicating the knowledge of “seeing a doctor” can help people become familiar with the medical treatment process, reduce the waiting time for medical treatment, and help the public master many medical skills.
Finally, talking about “disease cognition” means to spread medical science thoughts and promote the spirit of medical science. It is the highest level and the most overlooked part of medical communication. To prompt the public about the limitations of medicine with a scientific perspective is favorable to establish a good trust of doctors and patients and rational allocation of social medical resources.
Take depression as an example. Some people think it as a flood of beasts and incurable disease, whereas others may think depression is nothing but a disease-free symbol of nothing to look for. These two concepts are wrong. Depression is a very common mental illness that requires attention and care. It requires the necessary psychological and medical treatment as well. If it is not identified and intervened in time, it may have serious consequences. The misunderstanding of this is a popular content for medical communication.
If you have advanced cancers, will you choose to give up any treatment, or go bankrupt and seek medical attention at all costs to continue life? In modern medicine, there is a concept of “survival with cancer,” that is, you can think of cancer as a chronic disease as hypertension or diabetes. For those patients who are already in the advanced stage of cancer and have no active treatment, they can coexist with the cancer, taking only symptomatic treatment to soothe the symptoms and reduce the pain of the patient. For those patients at the end of the disease, who are expected to live for less than half a year, they can also carry out hospice care. Physically, try to reduce the patients’ pain as much as possible and mentally, help patients and their relatives and friends reduce fear and anxiety and prepare patients to leave. It requires both medical knowledge and humanistic spirit. The famous American doctor, Trudeau said, “sometimes heal, often help, always comfort.” Medicine is not omnipotent. Doctors are not omnipotent. Even though today’s medicine has reached the molecular level, many diseases are still incurable. The role of medical communication is to help people to treat diseases correctly and rationally, to understand the natural laws of “life and death”, to choose the most appropriate treatment and treatment methods, and to apply medical resources reasonably.
3.Relationship between medical communication and health communication
Before the concept of “health communication” was formally introduced, there was an alternative concept in the West, namely “therapeutic communication”. Therapeutic communication is closely related to medicine. Until the mid-1970s, health communication, which is a more comprehensive and more abundant concept, has been promoted instead of this restricted one.
Scholars give their own definition of health communication from different angles. Originally proposed by L.D. Jackson in 1992, he believes that “health communication is to use the mass media as a channel to transmit health-related information to prevent disease and promote health. In the process, the mass media is in the medical field. The results have been transformed into public health knowledge prediction and dissemination, and the correct construction of social landscapes to help the audience to establish prevention concepts plays an important role.” Then, American scholar E.M. Rogers proposed a definition that “Health communication is a specialty field of communication study that includes the media agenda-setting process for health issues, media advocacy for health, scientific communication among biomedical scientists, doctor–patient communication, and particularly, the design and evaluation of preventive health communication campaigns. The main dependent variables of study in health communication research are usually of unquestioned good: HIV/AIDS prevention, substance abuse prevention and early treatment, improved doctor–patient communication, the effectiveness of media advocacy for health lifestyles, avoidance of unwanted pregnancy, smoking cessation, early detection of cancer, and the prevention of drunk-driving accidents.” He gave a brief explanation of health communication in 1996. “Health communication is any type of human communication whose content is concerned with health” (Rogers, 1996, p. 156). Xu Meiling, a scholar from Taiwan, also discussed the definition of health communication. She considered that “Health communication is the process of people seeking, processing and sharing medical information. It is concerned not only with the process of individuals seeking medical information or the communication between doctors and patients, but also with the flow and processing of information throughout the medical system.” The focus of her definition is on the medical field, including the subject, object, and media of health communication. Second, it is multilevel, with individual behavior, as well as systematic behavior.
Health communication is an act of spreading health-related content by four different delivery levels. They are self-individual communication, interpersonal communication, organizational communication, and mass communication. For example, the physical and mental health of individuals is at the level of self-individual, while the relationship between doctor and patient’s family is at the interpersonal level, and the relationship between hospital and patient, the on-the-job training of medical staff is at the organizational level and media issue setting. The relationship between media and audience is at the mass level. These four levels do not clearly transmit the subject; they just contain all the health-related content. For this reason, health communication does not emphasize the professionalism of the source of communication to ensure the scientific nature of the content.
From the perspective of scientific communication, medical communication attempts to reduce the unequal information between the two in medical knowledge by building bridges between experts and the public, and to create a scientific culture of society. In this process, it is very clear that the communicator of communication is a professional medical staff. At the same time, it emphasizes the professionalism and scientific nature of the content. Health communication and medical communication are similar in the topic of communication, but there is a fundamental difference. Some examples from the four levels will help us to illustrate the difference between medical communication and health communication.
First, let us see an example at the level of self-individual communication. There was a middle-aged person who was overweight. In order to be healthy, he began to eat only one meal a day. His weight was reduced after two months. He thought this was a very good, effective, and harmless way of losing weight, so he continued. This is the self-individual communication in health communication. For each specific individual, the content of the communication is difficult to control. Those who lack medical common sense will take for granted that some unhelpful and even harmful ways are good for health. Such defects in health communication are difficult to avoid. While in medical communication, if the middle-aged person needs to lose weight, a doctor will complete a health evaluation to confirm whether he is overweight and whether he needs to lose weight at first. Then the doctor will tell him how to scientifically and gradually lose weight, how to lose weight to bring the greatest benefits, and how to avoid the harm of excessive weight loss. It can avoid ambiguity of communication content and the harm to people.
The self-individual communication level in medical communication is the scientific self-propagation under the guidance of professional medical personnel. It can be considered as medical communication if the same person lost his weight guided, approved, and supervised by medical staff.
Second, take an example at the level of interpersonal communication. A diabetic who controlled his blood sugar well by eating only one meal a day and running for two hours a day felt that his blood sugar management experience was very effective. Thus, he shared his experience with his family and other friends with diabetes. This belongs to the human-to-human communication of health, not medical communication. The communicator of medical communication