The Discourse of Comfort in Chinese Online Medical Consultations

This book integrates perspectives from Conversation Analysis and discursive psychology to shed light on doctor-patient communication in asynchronous web-based interactions through the lens of the discourse of comfort.

Ying Jin is Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Communication at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Introduction: Toward an interactional understanding of comforting and online healthcare Chapter 2 Preliminaries and methodology Chapter 3 "This is quite common": Normalizing and reassuring Chapter 4 Showing compassion Chapter 5 Rendering bad news bivalent Chapter 6 Resistance to comfort and its management Chapter 7 Summary, emergent themes, and future directions Index