Storytelling in Health Communication: A Poorly Told Story?

Abstract

This article presents a qualitative review, anchored on the Narrative Studies, of scientific publications that address the use of storytelling in Health Communication. To this end, it begins by a theoretical framework about these two concepts and subsequently provides a review of scientific publications available in the PubMed database, in order to better understand how the concept of storytelling is approached by publications in Health, as well as which media are used in the initiatives described that resort to its use. In general terms, this review concluded that the analyzed publications point to proven benefits of using storytelling in various scopes of Health Communication. However, although these publications mostly define the concept of storytelling, the references used in this context do not seem to be based on Narrative Studies, the origin area of the concept of storytelling and by which it is widely studied.