ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how each paradigm understands and interrogates culture and explores through exemplar cases how health communication scholars study Chinese medicine. When discussing culture and health communication, what often emerges is research about communicating with racial and ethnic minorities. While a vast majority of research regarding health communication and culture, especially from a scientific paradigm, has examined the attributional dimension, people are not just grouped together based on their cultural similarities, beliefs, or practices. The interpretive and critical models in health communication have been important in breaking down biased theories of culture that tend to homogenize and overgeneralize and focus solely on medicalized definitions of effectiveness. To better understand the complexity of socio-cultural influences on health will review exemplar studies from a variety of perspectives and paradigms about Chinese medicine. Health communication research that focuses on socio-cultural influences needs to take into account research from all three paradigms and pragmatically integrate them.
