3 Summary of Week 4

This week has only considered human to human communication within the limited setting of a doctor’s surgery. The field of health communication is far broader than this, ranging from patient information leaflets to online health forums. You may also make use of online symptom checkers before speaking to a human about any health concerns – and the future of health communication might well come to rely on chatbots as ‘conversational agents’ drawing on rapid advances in both artificial intelligence and digital technology (Laymouna et al., 2024). It’s interesting to consider how this might affect the ensuing conversation.

Hopefully the material this week has given you some insight into how doctors and other healthcare practitioners can use linguistic means to elicit valuable information from patients that will help them in their diagnosis, whether steering them more tightly towards fixed responses, or opening up possibilities for them to express their concerns more freely. Doctors learn to convey their diagnoses to patients in a sensitive way and with due caution. Understanding the different stages of a medical consultation can help practitioners to see how the encounter unfolds from both patient’s and doctor’s perspectives.

In Week 5 you’ll learn about the work of a speech and language therapist and the role of language analysis in this job.

You can now go to Week 5.