The Dissemination of Dietary Treatments for Refractory Epilepsy: A Preliminary Analysis of Web-based Discourse on the Ketogenic Diet

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, Luzón 2015; Turnbull 2015a, 2015b; Maglie 2017; Mattiello 2017); however, to the best of our knowledge, limited empirical research has been conducted on investigating the intersection of knowledge dissemination and health literacy (Muñoz-Miquel 2012; Briones 2015) especially for chronic diseases such as epilepsy. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the strategies employed for the dissemination of medical knowledge to caregivers (i.e., definitions, denominations, reformulations, exemplifications, scenarios; Gülich 2003; Calsamiglia, van Dijk 2004; Garzone 2006) through web-based materials, dealing in particular with a specific dietary treatment for refractory epilepsy in paediatric patients ‒ the Ketogenic Diet. The analysis is carried out on a corpus of web-based informative materials, the so-called Keto-Corp, collected from the websites of the two major foundations providing information on the Ketogenic Diet: the Matthew’s Friends Foundation (https://www.matthewsfriends.org) for the UK and the Charlie Foundation (https://charliefoundation.org) for the US. From a methodological perspective, recourse to corpus linguistics and discourse analytical tools shall enable us to investigate not only the dissemination strategies involved but also the metadiscourse used (Hyland 2005) to make the audience participate to the construction of knowledge.