Biomedical models

The biomedical and biopsychosocial models have been two significant approaches as ways of attempting to decipher the pathways of health, disease, and well-being. The traditional biomedical model considers disease to be primarily a failure within the body, resulting from infections, accidents and inheritance and does not regard any social and psychological aspects of illness within the model. The biopsychosocial model is the predominant model of understanding illness today by incorporating the social and psychological factors into the prevailing biomedical model. It is a better way of understanding how health and illness are affected by many levels of systems, from molecular to the societal, and how these can affect the overall well-being of the patient. There are many differences between the two models and so these two models will be compared and contrasted with each other to show how each understands illness and how it maintains health and well-being for individuals and society.

A kind of prostitution

Within Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters explains many ways in which Western biomedicine has incorrectly pushed an essentialist way of treating certain mental illnesses onto other cultures. This essentially means that Western medicine presumes that all people, no matter what culture they are from, react to trauma in the same way. The situation Watters goes most in depth on is the tsunami that struck Sri Lanka. He describes a huge rush of Western psychiatrists to the area where they counseled victims in an “assembly-line” manner (81).