Does medicine need psycho-social science?

Abstract

Despite Alma Ata in 1978, the developing countries continue to divert scarce resources to multiple-story tertiary hospitals at the expense of primary health care services. No country in the world has unlimited resources with regard to budget allocation for health care. Paradoxically, a number of advanced western countries are in the forefront with regard to budget allocations to primary care. The continuing dominance of the biomedical/engineering model of health care which views the human body as a machine requiring regular servicing and fixing is the major stumbling block – hence the current suspicions and disequilibrium between the non-selective bio-psycho-social primary health care approach and biomedicine. Biomedicine, with the hospital as a bureaucratic organisation, remains the latent albatross over communities and legislators alike. Behavioural sciences, underpinned by the bio-psycho-social consultation model need to be introduced urgently in all medical school curriculums. (SA Fam Pract 2004;46(3): 05-07)