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the bio-psycho-social model and beyond: its limitations and the need for a new model. a response to eid's editorial, “the bio-psycho-social model: how accurate and valid is it?”

Letter Open Access
Giovanni Del Puente1 and Nicola Luigi Bragazzi2*
1Psychiatry Department, DINOG, Department of Neuroscience, Ophthalmology and Genetics, University of Genoa, 16100 Genoa, Italy
2School of Public Health, Department of Health Sciences (DISSAL), University of Genoa, Via Pastore 1, 16132 Genoa, Italy
*Corresponding author: Nicola Luigi Bragazzi
School of Public Health
Department of Health Sciences (DISSAL)
University of Genoa
Via Pastore 1, 16132 Genoa, Italy
E-mail: robertobragazzi@gmail.com
 
Received September 01, 2012; Published October 20, 2012
 
Citation: Del Puente G, Bragazzi NL (2012) The Bio-psycho-social Model and Beyond: Its Limitations and the Need for a New Model. A Response to Eid's Editorial, “The Bio-Psycho-Social Model: How Accurate and Valid is it?” 1:399. doi:10.4172/scientificreports.399
 
Copyright: © 2012 Del Puente G, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
 
There is definitely an urgent need for a new health/disease model in psychiatry and, generally speaking, in internal medicine and in public health, as pointed out by Eid in his editorial [1]. The bio-psycho-social model developed by Engel [2] cannot capture the multidimensionality of the disease, which is indeed a dynamical [3] and complex phenomenon, characterized by “wholism, diversity, robustness and flexibility (as) hallmarks” [4]. We agree that biological, psychological and social levels are not separate at all: not only in the well-known sense that both biological and social treatments have biological effects but also in the sense that biological and genetic potentials have a social impact, as shown by Damasio [5-7].
 
While many scholars have emphasized some missing dimensions in the classical bio-psycho-social model [8-10] or underpinned phenomena that fail and resist to be explained by that model [11-14], the model proposed by Eid [1] (“the somato-psycho-social model”) can indeed overcome these limitations and pave the way for further research in the field.
 
 
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