The Biopsychosocial model

I'm a little busy at the moment preparing for an interview, so posts won't be so frequent for a few days. In the mean time, readers might like to take a look at this paper: Medically unexplained symptoms: the biopsychosocial model found wanting.

On the face of it, the biopsychosocial model might sound as though a way had been found to overcome mind-body dualism. Taking a systems theoretic stance, we can view the individual as a biological organism, with a personal psychology, participating in a society.

As the authors argue, however, the use of this model in practice reinforces dualistic thinking. If no biological pathology is found in a patient, the illness is taken to be psychologically or societally induced, and the patient brought to understand that they have misrepresented the system level relevant to their disorder.

On the authors' view,

Rather, clinicians have an important role as experts in the process of helping patients interpret and make sense of their pain as part of their legitimate experience of the world, and, as such, the interpretivist view provides a more satisfactory philosophical rationale for a patient-centred clinical method.