Communication, communication and even medical communication

What is it about? Let’s start with the Wikipedia definition: “Communication (from Latin comm - ūnicāre, meaning ‘to share’) is the purposeful activity of information exchange between two or more participants in order to convey or receive the intended meanings through a shared system of signs and semiotic rules.”¹ So it is about sharing information on purpose, and in this light medical communication should be perceived as any medical information shared between any parties, as long as it is done on purpose. But is it really what we, medical writers, have in mind when talking about medical communication? To check it, I went back to the archive of Medical Writing and even The Write Stuff (Medical Writing ancestor) and searched for a definition or explanation. It didn’t take me long to come across Ryan Woodrow’s article in which he tries to answer a very simple question: “So what exactly does your job involve?” Ryan is a freelance medical communication consultant. His answer is simple and short: “I help pharmaceutical companies to communicate about their drugs to doctors”, but then he elaborates: