Health Communication and the Information Model in Sociohistorical Context.

It is common in health communication to speak of the “centrality” of communication in medicine and health promotion or, conversely, how health has become “central” to communication research. However, scholarship in health communication has yet to address the sociohistorical context of how and why this concept called “communication” became central to health and medicine in the first place. For as much as communication is taken for granted today as the cornerstone of quality health care for Americans, this was not the case even forty years ago when doctors’ authority went unquestioned. At a time when calls are increasing for health communication scholarship to focus more on the social context of medicine and health, the idea of communication ought to be interrogated from outside the taken-for-granted assumptions of the field. This paper takes this approach as it examines how communication is conceptualized in the field of health communication, specifically, in the area of doctor-patient communication. I make the case that health communication is dominated by the information model of communication and this colors what the field considers “good” communication should be between patient and physician within the context of medicine becoming more “consumer” or patient-centered and focused on informed decisionmaking. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]