An interdisciplinary course in health communication can begin to bridge the gap in knowledge between different health care disciplines and provide epistemological gains for both health care practitioners and communication scholars. Possible topics include patient interviewing, health education, practitioner/patient relationships, health care teams, therapeutic communication, health care ethics, and communication in health care organizations. In health education training, health care providers are instructed how to describe and explain complex health care topics and procedures clearly and explicitly. The practitioner/patient relationship is examined as a crucial issue in health care provision, and poor health care relationships are identified as a primary cause of many current problems in the health care system. The importance of developing effective health care teams is examined in light of the growing specialization and complexity of modern health care practice. Therapeutic communication is identified as a key communication characteristic of helping, and health care is characterized as a helping profession. Ethics in health communication are examined as moral evaluations of the correctness of health care behaviors, and health care organizations are presented as the primary social systems for the delivery of health care services to the public in the modern world. (HOD)