Health as communication: family and community medicine

Abstract

This article discusses some keys to understand the intrinsic relationship that can exist
between health and communication from the perspective of family and community medicine.
Epistemologically it is considered necessary to reflect on this connection, given that generally both
concepts are understood externally, which implies an instrumentalization of the communication
and a simplification of the service provided by health workers. From the experience of creation
and growth of this type of medicine in the context of Uruguay, the close presence, often little
obvious though, of the generalist medical practice is set out in the social history of the populations.
Considering the main activity in the first-level of healthcare, communication is valued as an
experience of encounters between subjectivities, and their dialogic management becomes crucial
to conceptualize in different way the same notion of health. Health communication is approached,
therefore, as an additional element of health, while health shows its communicational aspect from
the point of view of cultural dynamics and processes of subjectivation.