The “Doctor-Patient Communication Project” (DocPat Project) is an concluded interdisciplinary project, set at the crossroads between discourse studies, linguistics and the medical sciences. It addressed the challenges posed by communication in the context of the medical consultation, focusing in particular on the specific situational variables of consultations with diabetic patients.
The project aimed at answering two specific questions, which can be summarized as follows:
(1) Is it possible to identify any preferred argumentative strategies within the medical consultation?;
(2) How is the effectiveness of argumentative strategies ‘prepared’ through the linguistic behavior adopted throughout the consultation?
The project has run from March 2012 to March 2014.