Salud, comunicación y sociedad

The traditional media and the Internet are transforming doctor-patient relations by ensuring that scientific knowledge is no longer an elitist preserve that is on the margins of society. This report aims to lay the foundations for raising public awareness of a variety of subjects related to health. The distrust among the medical and journalistic professions, the need for more academic centers that combine both disciplines, the rather negative image that society has of the pharmaceutical industry, and the lack of quality control of the information available on the Internet were some of the questions analyzed in the conference entitled Healthcare, Communication and Society organized by the BBV Foundation in Madrid in 1997, which this report summarizes.