Medical model

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The medical model describes the approach to illness that is dominant[citation needed] in Western medicine. It aims to find medical treatments for diagnosed symptoms and syndromes and treats the human body as a very complex mechanism (hence, Goffman's tinkering trade analogy).

Among critics of medical psychiatry, Laing observed that because the diagnosis of a mental illness was based on conduct or patient behavior and not on evident pathology, such a "diagnosis" essentially contravened standard medical procedure and hence the medical model: examination and ancillary tests were conducted, if at all, only after the diagnosis was made.

At all events, whereas heart diseases, cancers, and broken bones were diagnosed by evident pathology discovered during examination and ancillary tests, a mental illness was diagnosed by patient's conduct (paranoid delusions, catatonia, hypermania, etc.), with only an implication of a genuine pathology not cited at the time of diagnosis.

The medical model drives research and theorizing about physical or psychological difficulties on a basis of causation and remediation.

It can be contrasted with the holistic model of the alternative health movement and the social model of the Disability rights movement, as well as to biopsychosocial and recovery model's of mental disorder.

[edit] Other uses

In modern medicine (2007) a specialist understands and uses the holistic bio-psychosocial approach - Medical model.

"Many people critize, and psychiatrists apologize, for the use of the 'medical model'. We propose that psychiatrists should use the medical model to improve and validate bio-psychosocial psychiatric medicine..... We propose that the 'medical model' is a process whereby, informed by the best available evidence, doctors advise on, coordinate or deliver intervention for health improvement. It can be summarily stated as 'does it work?'." (Ref 4)

Medical model is the term cited by psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing in his The Politics of the Family and Other Essays for the "set of procedures in which all doctors are trained." This set includes complaint, history, examination, ancillary tests if needed, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis with and without treatment. Sociologist Erving Goffman, in his Asylums, favorably compared the medical model, which was a post-Industrial Revolution occurrence, with the conduct in the tinkering trades (watch, radio, TV repair).

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