Dosage A Guiding Principle for Health Communicators

Dosage is an important reframing of how we think about the challenges of communicating about health. Johnson thoughtfully uses the metaphor of pharmacological dose and demonstrates its applicability across a range of contexts, from the doctor breaking bad news to a patient, to distributed teams seeking to coordinate activity, to health promotion campaigns for behavior change. Health communicators -- whether marketing professionals, nurses and social workers, marketing practitioners, or social media bloggers -- can easily pick up lessons here from a wealth of scholarship about message development, channel selection, timing and frequency, and how to avoid the negative consequences of too much communication about a health issue. Here is a top-flight scholar offering us a new way to re-vision the challenges of professional communication. -- James W. Dearing, Michigan State University