The clinical application of the biopsychosocial model

How physicians approach patients and the problems they present is much influenced by the conceptual models around which their knowledge is organized. In this paper the implications of the biopsychosocial model for the study and care of a patient with an acute myocardial infarction are presented and contrasted with approaches used by adherents of the more traditional biomedical model. A medical rather than psychiatric patient was selected to emphasize the unity of medicine and to help define the place of psychiatrists in the education of physicians of the future.