Health Communication, History of

Health communication is a young but rapidly growing interdisciplinary area of study concerned with studying the powerful roles performed by human and mediated communication in health care delivery and health promotion. The field of health communication began to formalize in the early 1970s, but has roots that go back to early Greece and the medical philosopher Hippocrates who established the Hippocratic Oath concerning the ethics of medical practice. Health communication has developed as an exciting, applied social scientific area of inquiry that uses both qualitative and quantitative research to examine the many ways that communication influences health, health care delivery, and health promotion. Research concerning health communication is often problem-based, focusing on identifying, examining, and solving health care and health promotion problems. Health communication scholars ...