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Has the biopsychosocial model replaced the biomedical model as the main way of thinking about health in our society?

To answer the above question a history of each model will be shown and how they work effectively or non-effectively within today’s healthcare system.

The practice of medicine, for the past 200 hundred years, has been based on the thought that a specific cause ( i.e., virus, bacteria) is the underlying cause of all diseases and that the appropriate treatment should combat all the symptoms of the disease. This was the view of the healthcare system until the recent changing of ideas relating to health and disease. Instead of focusing solely on the biological cause of illness and disease (biomedical model), healthcare professionals are now actively encouraged to use the new model of health that takes into account psychological and social factors as well as the biological and treats the individual as a whole person who experiences an illness (Baggot 2004).

Most people understand that “health is good” and “disease is bad”, but to define these terms depends on the individual’s experience of disease. In 1946, the World Health Organisation (WHO) proposed that health is “a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease” (WHO cited in Naidoo and Wills 2000). The WHO sought to replace the biomedical model with the biopsychosocial model with this definition.
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A strict division between health and disease had been promoted by the biomedical model, which has its origins in the Doctrine of Specific Aetiology. Disease was thought to have been the result of certain malfunctions of the human body, which was thought of as a biochemical machine. The biomedical model also promoted the beliefs that all problems within that body could be traced to specific causes within the body. The biomedical model is reductionist in the sense that all illness and...