Main description:

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the role of argumentation in the health care domain. Argumentation and Health is a collection of essays by argumentation theorists reflecting on the way in which the institutional context of health care shapes the argumentative interaction. The volume provides for the first time an overview of the most important recent developments and achievements of the study of argumentation in medical and public oriented health communication. In Argumentation and Health , attention is paid to argumentation in different forms of health communication, such as the medical consultation, direct-to-consumer drug advertising, health brochures and health risk communication.
This book is of interest to argumentation theorists, (health) communication scholars, healthcare practitioners, students of medicine and health-related fields, and all other researchers and practitioners interested in the function and characteristics of argumentation in health communication. Originally published in Journal of Argumentation in Context, Vol. 1:1 (2012).

Contents:

1. Introduction; 2. Argumentation in the healthcare domain (by Rubinelli, Sara); 3. Argumentation and informed consent in the doctor-patient relationship (by Bickenbach, Jerome); 4. Institutional constraints on strategic maneuvering in shared medical decision-making (by Snoeck Henkemans, A. Francisca); 5. Reasonableness of a doctor's argument by authority: A pragma-dialectical analysis of the specific soundness conditions (by Pilgram, Roosmaryn); 6. Evaluating argumentative moves in medical consultations (by Bigi, Sarah); 7. Teaching argumentation theory to doctors: Why and what (by Rubinelli, Sara); 8. Direct-to-consumer advertisements for prescription drugs as an argumentative activity type (by Wierda, Renske); 9. The strategic function of variants of pragmatic argumentation in health brochures (by Poppel, Lotte van); 10. Argumentation and risk communication about genetic testing: Challenges for healthcare consumers and implications for computer systems (by Green, Nancy L.); 11. "It is about our body, our own body!": On the difficulty of telling Dutch women under 50 that mammography is not for them (by Schulz, Peter J.); 12. Index