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The diversity of contexts in which healthcare communication unfolds also reflects wider societal developments, such as the digitalisation of healthcare information, the increasing importance of patient-centred care models and the growing recognition of linguistic and cultural diversity in clinical settings. For this reason, healthcare communication is a vast and multi-faceted area of linguistic research, broadly encompassing any form of communication that takes place in a medical or healthcare context or relates to the description of health and illness. Given this rich and complex landscape, this special issue offers an interdisciplinary study of the role of discourse analysis and applied linguistics in healthcare communication. It offers insights into (1) past and present professional discourses on health and the body, (2) discourse analysis and healthcare communication, (3) the role of the applied linguist in healthcare communication, (4) the application of corpus linguistics to healthcare communication, and (5) the impact of applied linguistics on communicative practices.

Narrative therapy has been widely used in the study of eating disorders (EDs), in line with a trend in therapeutical intervention (not limited to eating disorders) that has successfully probed patients’ reports of their illness and recovery journeys in an attempt to better understand them and improve treatment outcomes. Recently, interest in recovery narratives has increased, not least because ED sufferers, and especially anorexia patients, often show ambivalence toward recovery—a factor that leads to high relapse rates. In light of this, investigating the linguistic features characterizing, respectively, the discourse of former anorexia sufferers who have successfully recovered, and of those who are still struggling, can help identify linguistic cues that may contribute to assessing patients’ attitudes towards recovery. This paper examines the discursive construction of illness and recovery in anorexia stories from Reddit’s r/AnorexiaRecovery, where recovering ED sufferers engage in conversation with their peers, often with the aim of finding support or solace (henceforth, ‘struggling recovery posts’), and ED-focused medical websites featuring full recovery stories (‘successful recovery narratives’). By analyzing recurrent lexical and syntactic features, this corpus-based study compares how ambivalence toward recovery is negotiated in successful versus struggling recovery discourse.

In recent years, a new digitalized system has been introduced by the National Health Service (NHS) in order to offer support and care to UK citizens. In particular, the Transformation Directorate at NHS England aims to drive the digital transformation of the NHS and social care. For instance, thanks to ‘technology-enabled remoter monitoring’ the NHS can deliver care to people in their homes. Starting from this assumption, this work is aimed at showing the significant role of corpus based tools when health services and care are offered to citizens. In particular, the immediate co-text of the nouns denoting the addressees of NHS policy is investigated in order to analyse the discursive strategies enacted by the NHS when people are informed about the new digitalized forms of healthcare communication. The study is based on a corpus based approach along with studies on transitivity processes, which will help to focus on the changing roles of the receivers of these new services. The outcomes confirm the existence of different lexical choice denoting the addressees of the NHS, thus revealing some changes due to the introduction of new digitalized tools of medical communication.

As non-mainstream medical practice is making headway and resisting the dominant discourse of biomedical practice, there is the need to understand how non-mainstream, alternative/complementary scholars provide a credible representation of themselves by creating a convincing discourse from within the boundaries of their discipline while enhancing visibility and impact to stay ahead of competition in today’s regime of ‘patronage and fear’ of academic life. Using a representative corpus of academic articles in this field, I look at how authors ‘position’ themselves and carve out a distinct knowledge space that reflects their professional identity and promotes the quality and credibility of their own research to the scientific community. To do this, I consider the markers of evaluation and stance in academic discourse analysis for their meaning making, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, and elucidate a context for interpretation, showing how patterns of promotional language are used to enhance visibility of, and attention for, both research and researchers within a super-crowded and competitive world of digital scholarly publishing.

The literature on the topic of cancer metaphors in health communication is substantial. However, there is surprisingly little research on how metaphors are used by and influence young patients. This study examines how adolescent cancer patients use metaphors to describe cancer, and discusses this usage as it relates to coping strategies compared to healthy adolescents. Data was based on eight recorded semi-structured interviews about cancer metaphors from the Metaphor Menu for People with Cancer, which were analyzed using thematic and discourse analysis. Findings show that adolescent patients and nonpatients most frequently chose the New Value metaphor and used problem-focused coping strategies. The results improve our understanding of how adolescents perceive and experience cancer, and provide a revealing perspective on their emotional wellbeing and social interactions.

This study investigates the impact of corpus linguistic feedback on healthcare professionals, particularly within cosmetic surgery consultations. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the research integrates quantitative corpus analysis with qualitative insights to examine linguistic patterns, such as stigmatising discourse, medical vs. lay terminology, and interactional asymmetry. The study involves data from three UK healthcare sites. Key findings reveal a significant use of lay terms by surgeons, an unexpected prevalence of patient interruptions, and the perpetuation of stigma through language. Feedback was provided to surgeons via an executive report, followed by their evaluations through questionnaires and debriefings. Results indicate that linguistic feedback heightened awareness among surgeons, prompting reflections on communicative practices and intent to implement changes. This study underscores the utility of corpus linguistics in enhancing healthcare communication and makes a contribution to the field of applied linguistics through the appraisal and recommendations offered for improving patient-centred care and communication.