Talk:Medical model

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[edit] Accuracy

This article is not at all accurate and is going to need an entire rewrite. It has this weird bias against psychiatry and includes incorrect information:

• 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, it (the "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. What is this from? Physicians and mental health professionals may conduct mental status exams, physical exams, personality tests, cognitive tests and usually do so utilizing a method of a differential diagnosis. If this is talking from a historical perspective, that is one thing - but the way it reads now, it is just wrong! Chupper 20:49, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I agree with the original author because historically this was the case, the pathology had to be tangible and if you challenge the findings, just look at the disparity in health care coverage for those with mental illness vs those with a pathological medically (defined) illness. There is no comarison. Healthcare policy dictates that there wll be a parody among the two until they can "prove" that mental illness has the potential to cause enough "pain& suffering" that physical illness does. In mental illness healthcare there is no "preventive" healthcare inclusion in the insurance, nor is there an inclusion for screening in schoolage children, teenagers or seniors.Actually most insureres expect that the illness is address and cleared up and managed in 30-60 days. gesimpson7 October 21, 2007

I think you overstate the facts here. Both in historical medicine and in modern medicine, there are many examples of "physical" medical conditions that are recognized on the basis of patient report: chronic pain, for example, or migraine with aura. These do not require any tangible pathology.

In fact, with these conditions, you are more reliant on patient report than you are with many of the well-known mental disorders, like bipolar disorder. I really have no way of differentiating between a person who suffers from serious migraines and a person who just wants to lie in bed and get some sympathy for three days. When you encounter a person in the middle of a full-blown manic episode, however, it's not too difficult to identify that something is wrong, even if the precise label is elusive, and long-term solutions perhaps impossible. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:13, 19 March 2008 (UTC)