Therapeutic advice: a rhetorical-argumentative perspective on doctor-patient communication

The purpose of this work is to analyze the persuasion which characterizes therapeutic advice and its collaborative goal. It is observed that this type of advice seems to be more effective when it is not limited to a mere scientific demonstration, but it considers also all the interlocutor’s subjective aspects. The study is supported by examples from a little corpus of transcribed real doctor-patient dialogues, collected and analyzed in a previous research work of the author. The research examines the principal arguments, argumentative figures and silences.