Hedging Strategies in Health Discourse : A Study of Pharmaceutical Leaflets

Abstract

Hedging, as a rhetorical tool, has received considerable attention from scholars from diverse fields of study such as advertisement, politics, and religion. Despite the extensive exploration of the topic, it has not received much attention in health communication. Thus, this study, which employs Quirk, Greeenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik's (1985) functional principle for establishing word class and Hyland's (1998) model as frameworks, investigated the various linguistic realizations and functions of hedges in pharmaceutical leaflets (PL), which are also called Patient Information Leaflets. The study, which is based on 50 PLs obtained from some leading pharmaceutical shops within the Cape Coast metropolis and other areas, adopted both qualitative and quantitative content analysis. It was found that pharmaceutical companies employed certain lexico-grammatical hedging devices to mitigate their claims. The study has implications for both patient-pharmacist communication and hedging theories.

Provision and Need for Medicine Information in Asia and Africa: A Scoping Review of the Literature

“…Terminology, language and font size were described as problematic in this latter study, which also assessed readability of 23 PILs using the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) score, 21 of which had scores requiring college or tertiary education reading ability [ 26 ]. Readability was not assessed in a further Ghanaian study that examined the language used in PILs [ 28 ], but three studies from other countries did assess readability [ 30 , 31 , 37 ]. One covered 107 ART products available in five countries (Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria and Zambia) [ 37 ], only 28 of which (26%) included a PIL, none of which met standard criteria for layout, all had small font and only 12 were written in easily understood language.…”

Factors that Facilitate and Hinder the Comprehension of Patient Information Leaflets (PILs): A Brief Scoping Review

“…The use of section titles is another format issue that seems useful for a faster and more comprehensible search of the information in the PIL ( Dickinson et al, 2016 ), as sometimes patients report having problems finding the information ( Pander Maat and Lentz, 2010 ; Pander Maat et al, 2015 ). Also, PILs on a physical format have shown to be more structured in their content and explanation than PILs on a digital format ( Afreh et al, 2017 ). In other study, the PILs approved by the national health authorities proved to be more readable and understandable than the information available on the internet ( Mira et al, 2013 ), even though the PILs did not meet the expected quality criteria.…”

“…Previous experience plays an important role in how the PIL is used. In fact, the main reason parents medicate their children seems to be their own experience with the symptoms that the minors present with ( Afreh et al, 2017 ). However, reading PILs significantly increased knowledge about the medicinal product despite not having much background information before reading it ( Dowse et al, 2014 ).…”

“…To know how they can feel better, users also prefer to know the benefits of the drug rather than their side effects (Hirsh et al, 2009). Although it is difficult to understand the leaflets, patients showed a great interest in learning about medicinal products (Hirsh et al, 2009), so they tended to search the internet for some prototypes of virtual leaflets that provided them with information easily and quickly (Afreh et al, 2017;Dickinson et al, 2017;Ahmadi et al, 2019). Further, the advice of a health professional that complements the information in the leaflets increases adherence to treatment (Ashok et al, 2017) and the active search for information (Symonds et al, 2011;Potter et al, 2014).…”

DataSheet1.xlsx

“…The use of section titles is another format issue that seems useful for a faster and more comprehensible search of the information in the PIL (Dickinson et al, 2016), as sometimes patients report having problems finding the information (Pander Maat and Lentz, 2010;Pander Maat et al, 2015). Also, PILs on a physical format have shown to be more structured in their content and explanation than PILs on a digital format (Afreh et al, 2017). In other study, the PILs approved by the national health authorities proved to be more readable and understandable than the information available on the internet (Mira et al, 2013), even though the PILs did not meet the expected quality criteria.…”