The structure-centered approach to health communication notes that structures play a crucial role in determining how people make sense of, or communicate about, health. The intersection between structures and an individual's or a collective's ability (agency) to make sense of the world—to communicate—has been discussed at length in the work of Anthony Giddens. The structure- agency duality taken into the realm of communication points to the notion that a society's rules and resources, in other words, structures, influence and are influenced by human communicative/sense-making patterns. When this conceptualization is transposed in the framework of health communication, the structure-centered approach to health communication situates health in the realm of the social structures that constitute it.

In his article on critical-cultural perspectives in health communication, Mohan Dutta-Bergman states ...