The biopsychosocial model of medicine is a way of looking at the mind and body of a patient as two important systems that are interlinked. The biopsychosocial model is also a technical term for the popular concept of the mind-body connection. This is in contrast to the traditional biomedical model of medicine. The model was proposed by psychiatrist George Engel in a 1977 article in Science. (Rolland, 2005)
The biopsychosocial model treats the biological, psychological and social issues as systems of the body, similar to the traditional medical systems such as the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. The biopsychosocial model draws a distinction between the actual pathological processes that cause disease, and the patient's perception of their health and the effects on it, called the illness.
Medalie distinguishes at one point between the biopsychosocial model and a systems model. The biopsychosocial model, however, seems to have its roots in systems theory as well as in cybemetics. It posits many levels of organization, ranging from the molecular to the social and ecological levels, related to each other in whole-part fashion, and generating interlevel information flow through a variety of feedback loops. These levels and feedback loops could possibly be viewed in mechanistic causeand-effect terms; but the biopsychosocial model seems to fit better with a probabilistic rather than a mechanistic model of reality, such as is favored by modem physics. (Street,Soldan, 1998)
Illness and disease do not necessarily run together. A patient may be reasonably well (no sickness), but if they feel unwell that's an illness. Similarly, patients with something physically wrong with them are diseased, but they may feel completely all right, they are not ill. The biopsychosocial model presumes that it is important to handle the two together as they are both important............
