Abstract:

Health communication is an interdisciplinary concept and set of practices that aims to explain the strategic importance of communication in addressing the health issues that we both directly experience and are indirectly affected by in the field of health, and to encourage applications towards this end. In the face of rising healthcare costs, the health field was integrated into the market system in the 1970s, with the aim of balancing its income and expenditure on the one hand, and making a profit from it on the other. In relation to this goal, the health services approach replaced the medical approach. This new approach aim to expand the field of health as a market by associating almost every aspect of life with health and including them in the scope of health. Health communication in the contemporary sense emerged at such a time, in an economic and political context driven by global dynamics. While health communication is beneficial in addressing health-related issues, its role as a means of legitimizing new health approaches driven by global macro dynamics creates a paradoxical situation. These dynamics, which are the primary determinants of increasing health problems, especially health inequalities, inherently limit the solutions that can be developed through health communication. This is a rather complex situation. Although it is aimed to develop strategic solutions to the problems in the field of health through health communication by neglecting this situation, it is still difficult to achieve this due to both the inherent uncertainties of the disease-health phenomenon and the problem-creating nature of the communication phenomenon itself. In addition, the concept of 'crisis pandemic' developed in this article highlights the interconnectedness of the problems in the field of health with other global problems, and therefore argues that these problems cannot be solved by developing solutions to the health system problems alone. The study examines the historical development of health communication and discusses the challenges that this discipline faces in providing solutions to the problems in the field of health and presenting successful practical examples in today's world.

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