DOSAGE

A Guiding Principle for Health Communicators uses dosage as a metaphor to help all healthcare professionals apply basic communication principles to their work. After a general overview of communication and its paramount importance in the health care setting, J. David Johnson, a professor of communications and former media research analyst for the U.S. Information Agency and author of five previous books, outlines the best practices for -Interpersonal communication in health care relationships, including that between physician and patient. He answers questions such as How Much Do I Reveal and When? , -Interprofessional teams, including teamwork, interdependence, stress and burnout, and communication in decision-making, -Mass Media, including searching for information and gaps in knowledge, -Knowledge diffusion and dissemination, -Change in communication, including social media, -Health information technology and how to handle the flood of communications we receive today. Johnson effectively expands his metaphor of dosage, detailing its many elements (amount, frequency, delivery system, sequencing, interaction with what other agents, and contraindications) as well as discussing the use and limits of metaphor generally. He explicitly addresses the following contexts