Full Description
Health is a contested concept that has been defined in numerous ways. The media is extremely powerful in promoting health beliefs and in creating role models for contemporary people. The ways in which health is defined or understood can have wide-ranging implications and can have an impact on issues such as health promotion or health literacy. Health presentation in the media has a significant social impact because this type of message is important in changing people's beliefs, attitudes and behaviours relating to health and in promoting health-related knowledge among the target audience. The present volume provides an interdisciplinary and multicultural contemporary approach to the controversial link between medicine and media. The authors that have contributed to this volume analyse the media and medicine from different perspectives and different countries (USA, UK, Portugal, Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico, Estonia, Romania), thus offering a re-positioning of the study of media and medicine. The new perspectives offered by this volume will be of interest to any health communication or media studies student or academic since they bring to light new ideas, new methodologies and new results.
Contents
Part I: Representations of Health and Illness in Mass Media
1. Depressing news: Obesity panic, reflexive embodiment and teen mental health in the USA
2. Media Coverage of the Ebola Virus Disease: A content analytical study of The Guardian and Daily Trust newspapers
3. Media representations of anorexia: Between medical discourse and show biz
4. From Germs to Ghosts: The politics of naming an epidemic
Part 2: Mediations of Doctor-patient Communication
5. Patients' interpretations of CAM-related information: Manoeuvring between patient and consumer positionings
6. 'Alone with my illness': Stories about chronic disease in Romania
Part 3: Journalists Discourses About Health
7. Health journalism practices in Portuguese newsrooms: An assessment of journalists' perceptions
8. What the media and health professions think about the health content of the media
Part 4: Internet and Health
9. Health in the digital era: Searching health information online
10. The web in healthcare: A new psychologist? Trends of search over the web in depression syndrome
11. Teenagers, risk behaviours and the use of new technologies for health
Conclusion: Media and health: Where do we go from here?
