Medicine has tried to correct this imbalance over recent years in its training and practice (see eg. post on my Relational Psychiatry blog). As expressed by George Engel (1977) when proposing his biopsychosocial model, the fundamental problem is the overemphasis on biomedical aspects of illness at the expense of psychosocial factors. Reform may well not be enough, which is why I like the website of The Patient Revolution, a nonprofit organisation. Managers and funders need to be held accountable for creating and fostering systems that allow patient care to happen. As I said in a previous post, medicine needs to be rethought.
