When Culture Talks, Healthcare Should Listen: Rethinking Empowerment Across the Ecosystem

I was recently thinking back to one of my first jobs in healthcare communications. Our agency was exploring the idea of reaching beyond the pharma-verse and had started looking – wait for it – at financial services. The rationale was simple: if health is wealth, and people are turning to mental health professionals to deal with financial stress, then maybe the borders between sectors weren’t as firm as we thought!

That project didn’t go anywhere, but it opened up something bigger: a realization that healthcare doesn’t exist in isolation. From wellness products to wearables, food to finances, the experiences of both patients and clinicians are shaped by a vast and interconnected cultural ecosystem.

We see this intersection playing out in one of the most influential channels we have: pop culture. Black Mirror’s “Common People” imagines a world where access to care depends on your subscription tier. South Park parodies Ozempic to spotlight the absurd intersection of wellness, image, and status. These stories are exaggerated, but they strike a chord because they reflect a very real feeling: that healthcare, for many, feels impersonal, transactional, or out of reach.

For those of us working in pharmaceutical marketing, these aren’t just clever critiques. They’re signals. And they’re telling us something important: what we often frame as “empowerment” doesn’t always feel that way to the people on the receiving end.

Empowerment Can’t Happen Without Acknowledgment

The patient will always be our North Star, and we’ve made great strides in surfacing authentic insights. But too often, those insights are filtered through systems designed to deliver behavior change, rather than human understanding. We talk about empowering people to take control of their health. But that drive doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Empowerment is shaped by access, identity, trust, emotion – and by full cultural context.

This challenge includes clinicians, too. They’re navigating pressures of time, policy, burnout, and bias. Their barriers are real. And they consume a lot of the same pop culture as patients, which means that the messages delivered there influence their thinking, even if just subconsciously.

If the signals from culture are telling us something is broken, we can’t afford to ignore them. We need to listen more honestly, and more expansively.

Where We Go From Here: Five Ways to Strengthen Patient and Clinician Insight

1. Bring cultural context into the insights process. TV shows, memes, and everyday conversations are emotional barometers. These cultural signals help us understand what patients and clinicians are feeling, not just what they’re doing.
2. Treat social listening as emotional listening. Social platforms reveal unfiltered language, tone, and experiences. Use them to check whether your messaging rings true. Listen beyond the disease or therapeutic area.
3. Co-create with patients and clinicians, not just for them. Both groups bring expertise that can’t be captured in a slide. Build real partnership, in early strategy and creative stages. Advisory boards can be used for more.
4. Audit your tone, not just your claims. The truth of your brand lives in how it sounds and feels. A message that meets legal requirements can still miss the emotional mark. An “empowering” tone is not necessarily actually empowering.
5. Expand how you define success. Consider how supported patients and clinicians feel. How clearly they understand their options. How confident they are in their care, not just how adherent they are.

Empowerment as a Commitment

Some brands are already moving in this direction, investing in transparency, co-creation, and long-term partnerships with patient and clinician communities. They’re showing us what’s possible when you treat empowerment as an active relationship, not a static promise.

We don’t need to choose between insight and integrity. We just need to listen with more intention. Culture is talking. Patients and clinicians are talking. It’s on us to hear what they’re really saying – and act on it.