Rethinking Culture in Health Communication: Social Interactions as Intercultural Encounters 1st Edition

The book does an excellent job covering a wide range of theories in public health and health communication. The book is old-school in that it covers all the popular concepts and theories in these areas. However, it also adopts an interdisciplinary and holistic approach to these issues, including major arguments from multiple disciplines, such as sociology, bioethics, medicine, communication, and social policies.This book can revolutionize your perspectives about how to think about communication in health contexts. They inject innovative and original insights into these theories, offering new ways to connect these concepts in ways that are obvious but rarely done in the field. My students tell me that they constantly find new ways to apply the concepts from the book to their everyday life and the latest news.

I love the authors' interdisciplinary approach to culture. I find the book's approach to culture refreshing. In addition to incorporating common approaches to culture (e.g., culture as ethnic/racial groups, speech communities, worldviews, and living processes) when exploring health behaviors, the authors also proposed innovative and original framework (i.e., Magic Consciousness, Mythic Connection, Perspectival Thinking, and Integral Fusion) as they reviewed and reframed existing health theories from a wide range of subfields, including public health, health communication, medical sociology, and interpersonal communication. This book provides detailed overviews of popular health theories but also offers poignant reflection and critique on how different cultural approaches can lead to a different understanding of realities and solutions to our health problems.