Biomedical Vs Psychosocial Models of Health and Illness

Running head: BIOMEDICAL VS. PSYCHOSOCIAL MODELS OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS
BIOMEDICAL VS. PSYCHOSOCIAL MODELS OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS
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BIOMEDICAL VS. PSYCHOSOCIAL MODELS OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS1
Introduction
While there exist a number of frameworks and models to expound upon the concepts of
illness and health, the bio-psychosocial and biomedical models of health continue to be one of
the most widely relied upon and criticized frameworks for understanding illness and disease
states (Olufowote and Wang 2017). Thus, the following sections of this paper will provide an
extensive and elaborate discussion on the key principles underlying biomedical and psychosocial
models, the existence of comparative similarities between the two as well as the prevalence of
differences in the form of critical arguments.
Discussion
The Biomedical Model
The ‘Biomedical model’ of illness and health first underwent emergence during the 19th
and 20th century and has been one of the oldest and prevalently used models for the purpose of
understanding an individual’s underlying disease pathologies and health status (Farre and Rapley
2017). The biomedical model aims to demonstrate or project a surrogate framework for an
individual or a human biological system so as to comprehensive comprehend the prevalence of
abnormal and normal functioning across phenotypes and genes. Such comparative
understandings, as per the biomedical model, paves the way for the development of therapeutic
or preventive interventions for disease management (Chambers, Feero and Khoury 2016).
Thus, with this respect, the biomedical model views optimum health as a complete
absence of any form of defects of diseases and believes that illness is a result of abnormalities in
the cellular mechanisms of the body. Such perceptions of the biomedical model are largely
reflective of the prevalent health and treatment opinions during its times of conception, when it

BIOMEDICAL VS. PSYCHOSOCIAL MODELS OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS2
was believed that diseases are caused entirely by pathogens such as viral or bacterial strains
(Ostaszkiewicz, Dunning and Streat 2018). Based on such assumptions, the biomedical model
believes that for the purpose of developing treatment interventions, there is a need to first
understand the pathology underlying disease followed by outlining the key factors which may be
contributing to the same (Farre and Rapley 2017). Therapeutic interventions and action plans are
thus developed as models which best fit mitigation of the causative factors underlying disease
pathology. Since the biomedical model places greater importance on the prevalence of disease
and not overall health, treatment interventions proposed by this model are single-factorial in
nature – meaning that they only target the factors causing illness, and not non-disease related
contributory factors associated with an individual’s health (Hankivsky et al. 2017).
The Bio-psychosocial Model
The bio-psychosocial model of health and illness was formulated by George Engel during
the 1970s. This model, as the name suggests, is based upon the principle that the fields of
psychology, biology and an individual’s social and environmental factors are strongly
interconnected to each other and this interconnection can be used to understand the causative
factors of disease and health status in an individual (Bolton and Gillett 2019). The bio-
psychosocial model thus relies on the idea that an individual’s health status can be defined
merely by the presence or absence of illness but rather must be viewed as an equilibrium across
the above three fields. Due to such principles, the bio-psychosocial model contributed to the need
for considering and individual’s cultural and social identities as well as existing psychological
conditions and mental health status for the purpose of developing health assessments and
therapeutic interventions (Kusnanto, Agustian and Hilmanto 2018).