Broadcasting medical discourse: the dissemination of dietary treatments for refractory epilepsy through YouTube

New media and Web 2.0 are having a significant impact on science and technology for the communication of specialized topics from experts to non-experts (Garzone 2007). Many studies have focused on the dissemination of medical discourse through digital media (see among others Wiese 2002; Vicentini 2012; Luzon 2015; Turnbull 2015; Mattiello 2017); however, to the best of our knowledge, no empirical research has been conducted on the linguistic and rhetorical features of broadcast platforms, i.e. Youtube, used to disseminate medical topics. The purpose of this paper is thus to analyze the strategies employed for the dissemination of medical knowledge (i.e. definitions, denominations, reformulations, exemplifications, scenarios [cf. Calsamiglia, van Dijk 2004, Gülich 2003]) on Youtube, dealing in particular with a specific dietary treatment for refractory epilepsy in paediatric patients, i.e. the Ketogenic diet. The analysis is carried out on a corpus of a series of video clips (i.e. Bites From Banff: Interviews From The 5th Global Symposium on Ketogenic Diet Therapies) gathered from the Youtube Channel of the well-known Charlie Foundation that provides information about the Ketogenic diet as a therapy for people with epilepsy, other neurological disorders and select cancers. The 38 videos deal with a range of topics about epilepsy and 11 its management with the diet and they are presented by different health professionals (e.g. neurologists, pediatricians, nutritionists, etc.) . Textual data are retrieved from the broadcast. From a methodological perspective, recourse to corpus linguistics and discourse analytical tools shall enable us to investigate the dissemination strategies involved (Gülich 2003; Calsamiglia, van Dijk 2004; Garzone 2006) and the metadiscourse (Hyland 2005) used to guide the non-expert receivers of the video (textual metadiscourse) through medical issues, and to make the audience participate to the construction of knowledge (interpersonal metadiscourse).