Biomedical Model Quotes

The body remembers. It waits, patiently, until we feel strong enough to meet the parts we have abandoned. The ones we want most to forget.

The Wessely School rejects the significant body of biomedical evidence demonstrating that chronic “fatigue” or “tiredness” is not the same as the physiological exhaustion seen in ME/CFS and persists in believing that they have the right to demand a level of “evidence‐based” definitive proof that ME/CFS is not an “aberrant belief” as they assert, when their biopsychosocial model of “CFS/ME” that perpetuates their own aberrant belief about the nature of ME/CFS has been exposed by other psychiatrists as being nothing but a myth.

Ethan Watters published a book called Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, which details how psychiatry and psychopharmacology have collaborated to basically make the rest of the world as miserable as America,

In the domain of mental health, huge pools of data are being used to train algorithms to identify signs of mental illness—a threat I call “surveillance psychiatry.” Electronic health records, data mining social networks, and even algorithmically classifying video surveillance will significantly amplify this approach. Corporations and governments are salivating at the prospect of identifying psychological vulnerability and dissent.

At present, psychiatry is ruled by the biomedical model, which attributes all disturbed mental and emotional function to imbalances in brain chemistry, treatable with drugs. If this were the whole story, psychiatric drugs would be much more effective than they are. Pharmaceutical companies exaggerate their benefits and downplay their risks in marketing them to both doctors and the public.

The word psychiatry derives from Greek roots meaning “soul doctoring”—a noble enterprise. Sadly, psychiatry today has lost touch with its roots. It is now dominated by the biomedical model, which attributes all disturbances of mental and emotional health to imbalances of brain biochemistry, correctable by medication. Big Pharma has taken great advantage of this by marketing an array of drugs to treat depression, anxiety, and major mental illnesses.

The dominant model of disease in our time is biomedical, built on a foundation of molecular biology. As Engel explains, It assumes disease to be fully accounted for by deviations from the norm of measurable biological (somatic) variables. It leaves no room within its framework for the social, psychological, and behavioral dimensions of illness. The biomedical model not only requires that disease be dealt with as an entity independent of social behavior, it also demands that behavioral aberrations be explained on the basis of disordered somatic (biochemical or neurophysiological) processes. Thus the biomedical model embraces both reductionism, the philosophic view that complex phenomena are ultimately derived from a single primary principle, and mind-body dualism.

The Icarus Project represents a new wave of resistance, one that shifts from the ontological questions of the definition of disease and illness, to the epistemological questions of whose stories and voices are considered in the production of psychiatric knowledge.

The voice of those with “lived experience” can be broadly grouped into two types, depending on whether they understand their own lives within the context of the conventional medical paradigm, or in resistance to that paradigm, and it is only the first group that is well heard by society

While biomedical models tend to use the terms complex visual hallucination, compound hallucination to denote apparitions, explaining their mediation by reference to aberrant neurophysiological activity in cerebral areas and/or the temporo-parieto-occipital junction, parapsychological models tend to combine such biomedical explanations with hypotheses related to a metaphysical origin of the perceived apparitions, such as the telepathic powers of dead or living agents.

Although claiming to be neutral as to what supposedly causes madness, the DSM and its diagnoses are based upon a biomedical model (Erlandsson & Punzi, 2016). Essentially, by medicalizing human suffering, the problems in society, within families, and the general injustice of the world go ignored. Instead, the problems are placed inside individual brains. If context is considered, it becomes a mere trigger of an underlying disease rather than the problem in itself.

But the biomedical model creates uncertainty for these common conditions that are not explained by underlying disease.”2 That uncertainty follows from our innate distrust of the patient’s story when we cannot match it with the hard data of physical examination techniques or scans, X-rays, blood tests, scopes, biopsies or electrodiagnostic tools. In such cases, the complainant finds her symptoms dismissed by doctors. Worse, she may be accused of drug-seeking behaviour, of being neurotic, manipulative, of “just looking for attention.” IBS patients, as well as people with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, often find themselves in that situation.

Pearl combines aspects of structural equations models and path diagrams. In this approach, assumptions underlying causal statements are coded as missing links in the path diagrams. Mathematical methods are then used to infer, from these path diagrams, which causal effects can be inferred from the data, and which cannot. Pearl's work is interesting, and many researchers find his arguments that path diagrams are a natural and convenient way to express assumptions about causal structures appealing. In our own work, perhaps influenced by the type of examples arising in social and medical sciences, we have not found this approach to aid drawing of causal inferences, and we do not discuss it further in this text.