We could use public relations strategies to advance discussion of the need for a health literacy. A health literacy that could provide a necessary basis for making informed decision-making, understanding of bias and levels of evidence, statistics, probabilities, and critical thinking skills. Public relation strategies can be used not to tell the public what to think, but what to think about. Advocacy may be considered as old as the ancient Greeks writings on politics. It targets a change in the regulatory environment, including the workplace or legislative arena.
Advocacy utilizes media, policy and social mechanisms in the effort to elicit change.
Today, social and media advocacy strive to influence the political agenda to enact policy change at a variety of levels. Negotiation was popularized with French diplomacy training in 1700. Today negotiation s aim is to change the nature of the involvement of people. In the health setting , such as the program at Dartmouth Medical School, it is termed Shared Decision Making, involving the patient in the treatment process. In other cases it can be influencing the decision maker responsible for delivering health messages.