BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL VS BIOMEDICAL ESSAY
2
Medical treatment can be a slippery slope and patients tend to always be surprising their
physicians. There is a pretty wide legislature in place to help protect patient freedom a
...
BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL VS BIOMEDICAL ESSAY
2
Medical treatment can be a slippery slope and patients tend to always be surprising their
physicians. There is a pretty wide legislature in place to help protect patient freedom and their
basic rights as a patient in health care. Providers are unable to control what medical decisions the
patient decides but they can present the information of the illness or disease as well as possible
treatment plans in a way that is attractive to the patient at hand. The two common models that are
used to present the illness or disease and the state that the patient is in is the biopsychosocial
model and the biomedical model. The biomedical model is one that is often used in western
medicine and tends to be seen as the more modern treatment of illness and disease. The
biomedical model targets “purely biological factors and excludes psychological, environmental,
and social influences” (Williams, Annadale, & Tritter, 1998). This biomedical model concludes
that other factors are not relevant and are not necessary for the diagnosis and treatment of a
patient. In this model of health and wellness, the patient is considered to be healed when there is
no longer pain, disease, or deformities on the patient. The biopsychosocial model opposes the
biomedical model in this way because of the fact that the biopsychosocial model takes into
consideration outside factors and concludes that external factors affect the patients’ health and
wellness. The biopsychosocial model takes into consideration several different factors such as
psychological factors, biological factors, and sociological factors (Santrock, 2002). This type of
model allows for patient treatment on a wider scale. These two common models are different by
the way that they view the leading cause of death with diseases, their ability to be researched,
their roles in diagnosis, and their key strengths and drawbacks.
The most common cause of death among Americans in the United States is heart disease.
When it comes to the two different models, the leading causes of death are looked at differently
through the two models. When looked at through the biomedical model, the factors to coronary
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