The ability to communicate is central to all professional activities and therefore being able to communicate effectively with mass media is essential. The medical doctor often needs to communicate not with a single patient or with a group of family members, but with "an important number of patients" through a microphone, a newspaper, a radio or a television. In this case it is not necessary to provide specific information on a single clinical case, but to provide simple, general information on a single pathology or a group of diseases to an interviewer or journalist, who will probably elaborate it at his own discretion making it usable to a diverse and unspecified audience. It is therefore important to be relevant to the question, clear in the presentation, but also synthetic to respect the time limits of interview.
Keywords: communication; mass media; medicine; patients.
Copyright by Società Italiana di Nefrologia SIN, Rome, Italy.