Language and Rhetoric in Health and Medicine

1.5 credits · Undergraduate

Explores how language creates, establishes and sometimes settles controversies in health and medicine. Examines how health communication impacts medical care and how language shapes health communication and outcomes. Includes politicians' use of military metaphors during pandemics, patients’ experiences of illnesses unrecognized by medical professionals, the role of social media in creating and resisting vaccine hesitancy, the history of medical racism as justified by scientific “objectivity” and the impact of pharmaceutical marketing on self-diagnosis.