PREFACE: Communicating Medicine Popularizing Medicine

This Volume is a collection of original chapters on various viewpoints of healthcare communication. In terms of approaches and aspects investigated, the variety of the studies presented in the Volume reflects the diversity of the forms of communication associated with various social practices and registers within the medical field. Scientific medical communication, both inter-and intra-specialistic comprises on the one hand genres reporting on scientific-medical research in its different branches (from physiology to pediatrics, from cardiology to orthopedics surgery, from gastroenterology to psychiatry, etc.) involving epidemiological observations and clinical trials, as well as the pharmacological and therapeutic implications. On the other hand, it includes forms of professional communication involving interaction with patients, essentially designed to collect elements to reach a diagnosis and provide indications for treatment; this also results in the re-elaboration of clinical data in technical forms of specialised discourse (clinical records, transcripts, reports, etc.). The need to communicate with patients is a distinctive peculiarity of healthcare discourse, where effective communication is much more important than in many other specialized domains, as doctors have to inform patients about their conditions, introducing important medical notions, and proposing actions for treatment.