Bio-Medical Model Essay

What conflicts exist between social and medical models of health and how might a holistic model help resolve these apparent conflicts?

Introduction.

The Bio- medical model.
There are various definitions of the medical model, Wikipedia, the internet encyclopaedia, currently defines it as ‘the predominant Western approach to illness, the body being a complex mechanism with illness understood in terms of causation and remediation, in contrast to holistic, and social models’.
The disabled people’s movement believe that it is based on a false notion of ‘normality’, with people being judged on what they cannot do. They believe that it sees people with disabilities as the problem, focusing on the impairment or the health condition. It

However these are often relegated to being of secondary importance to biological factors. The consequence of this is the majority of people being treated for mental health problems are often given pharmacological treatments before being offered any other type of approach. This continues despite the fact no commonly diagnosed mental health problems such as schizophrenia, bi-polar; anxiety disorders and major depression have been proven to be genetic or biological in origin. However there is much debate around this opinion (Kingdon 2007) has suggested that biological research has made no significant contribution to the practice of psychiatry, while (Perkins 2003) believes her mental health problems are caused by the way the chemicals in her brain... neurotransmitters- work, and that this is part of her genetic in heritance. Despite these differing perspectives, when we consider there has been many years of intensive research, during which time a huge amount of resources have been invested, it does beg the question whether there are any to be found. It also makes one speculate whether the bio-medical model approach continues to hold such dominance because of the vested interest of the pharmaceutical industry. A view held by Suman Fernando, as he discusses ‘global imposition’ of what he terms ‘western’ models of psychiatry, in

This opposition appears to be defined solely on the basis of impairment or the power imbalance of having clinicians rule the lives of service users/survivors. The social model should not be reduced to an outcome of social barriers alone, despite their relevance and significance in people’s lives, (Tew 2005), acknowledges the social model approaches or perspectives, may not come together in the form of a commonly agreed social model of mental health, but they do offer other ways of the viewing the