The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication

Contributor bios

Introduction: Language and health in the changing communication landscape

Part I: Informal and institutional discourses of health and illness

1.      Metaphors and the COVID-19 pandemic, Elena Semino

2.      Speaking your health: Self-appraised health, discourse and culture, Mark R. Luborsky

3.      Contesting chemotherapy, amputation, and prosthesis: Insights from patient and caregiver accounts, Vaidehi Ramanathan

4.      Corpus linguistics and health: Everyday discourses of menstrual health, Sara Vilar-Lluch and Emma McClaughlin

5.      Persuasion versus information in direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, Peter Schulz, Aline Rinaldi and Uwe Hartung

6.      Visuals in public health information – insights from multimodal social semiotics, Nina Nørgaard and Theo van Leeuwen

7.      Communicating health through online medical crowdfunding, Susan Wardell

8.      Health Communication in the NYC Linguistic Landscape – Balancing COVID Safety with Corporate Advertising, M Peregrine Balmat and Kylie Lance

9.      News media representations of health and illness, Emma Putland and Gavin Brookes

10.   Listening to People’s Voices: Everyday Health Communication in the Digital, Sylvia Jaworska

11.   Internet memes as a multimodal resource for communicating disparities during the COVID-19 pandemic, Erhan Aslan

12.   Illness blogs as identity work, Joyce Lamerichs and Charlotte van Hooijdonk

13.   Studying the Network and Dynamics of Communication in Online Health Communities for Patients with Chronic Conditions, Anna De Simoni

Part II Health professionals’ communicative practices

14.   Why read and write in the clinic? The contributions of narrative medicine to health care,    Rita Charon

15.   Health communication science for the real world: Making translational research the norm, not the exception, Sylvia Chou, Anna Gaysynsky and Andy S.L. Tan

16.   Presencing in the context of enhancing patient well-being, Sally Candlin and Chris Candlin

17.   Clinical incident reporting, incident investigation, and incident disclosure, Rick Iedema

18.   Exploring communicative interactions between visitors and assisted-living residents with dementia, Boyd Davis, Margaret Maclagan and Dana Shenk

19.   Mental healthcare professionals’ role performance: challenges in the institutional order of a psychiatric hospital, Branca Telles Ribeiro, Diana de Souza Pinto and Claudio Gruber Mann

20.   A Further Turn in Applied Sociolinguistics: Can Changing Conversations in a Large Medical School Transform its Culture? Richard M. Frankel and Elaina Chen

21.   Teaching medical students to become discourse analysts: from conversational transcripts to clinical applications, Mei-hui Tsai, Feng-hwa Lu and Richard M. Frankel

22.   Communication skills training in medical simulations – Perspectives from language and social interaction research, Sarah Atkins and Małgorzata Chałupnik

23.   From Medicine to Meaningful Conversations: The Current Landscape of Communication Training for Resident Physicians, Larrie Greenberg, Victoria Krieg and Adam Wolfe

Part III  Patient-provider communication and interaction

24.   The Language of Diagnosis: Labels, labelling, legitimacy and elucidation in interpersonal diagnostic interactions, Maria Dahm

25.   Nurse-Patient Interaction, Shelley Staples

26.   Clinician-patient communication about complementary and integrative health, Evelyn Ho and Christopher Koenig

27.   Negotiation of health, illness, and treatment in Traditional Korean Medicine, Ki-tae Kim

28.   Managing hopeful moments – Initiating and responding to delicate concerns about illness and health, Wayne Beach

29.   Midwives’ communicative expertise in obstetric ultrasound encounters, Srikant Sarangi and Heidi Gilstad      

30.   Analysing ethics-in-interaction in medical decision-making, Luke Thominet, Ellen Barton and Andrew Winckles

31.   Genetic counselling in Multicultural and Multilingual Contexts, Olga Zayts and Alison Pilnick

32.   Interpreting in the healthcare setting – Access in cross-linguistic communication, Claudia Angelelli

Biography

Nelya Koteyko is Professor of Language and Communication in the School of Arts at Queen Mary University of London. She is co-author, with Kevin Harvey, of Exploring Health Communication: Language in Action (Routledge, 2012)

Kevin Harvey is Associate Professor of Discourse Analysis in the School of English, University of Nottingham.

Daniel Hunt is Associate Professor of Discourse Analysis in the School of English, University of Nottingham.

Gavin Brookes is Reader in Linguistics and English Language within the School of Social Sciences at Lancaster University. He has co-authored The Language of Patient Feedback- A Corpus Linguistic Study of Online Health Communication (Routledge 2022), Historical Medical Discourse-Corpus Linguistic Perspectives (Routledge 2025), Masculinities and Language (Routledge, 2025) etc.