ArticleMedicine, health care, and philosophy2023
The biopsychosocial model: Its use and abuse.
Article in Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Understanding Generational Differences in Muslim American Mental Health Help-Seeking.Transcultural psychiatry · 2026Article
- Symptom Persistence Across Selected Orofacial Conditions: Toward a Chronic Explanatory Profile.Journal of oral rehabilitation · 2026Review
- [Medication adherence and its influencing factors in patients with oral lichen planus].Hua xi kou qiang yi xue za zhi = Huaxi kouqiang yixue zazhi = West China journal of stomatology · 2026Article
- What Is Precision Psychotherapy?The Journal of medicine and philosophy · 2026Article
- TMD and Bruxism as Expressions of Central Regulatory State: The Functional Occlusion Regulated Model (FORM).Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Review
- From Darkness to Light: Spiritual Turning Points in Recovery among Former Substance Users in Norway.Journal of religion and health · 2026Article
- Applying a causal biopsychosocial model to guide medicine and psychiatry fifty years after Engel.Communications medicine · 2026Review
- Mental health and kidney disease.Nature reviews. Nephrology · 2026Review
- The Pathway From Loneliness to Chronic Diseases: Examining the Mediating Roles of Depression and Self-Perceived Health, and the Moderating Effect of Age Among Older Adults in Israel.Journal of applied gerontology : the official journal of the Southern Gerontological Society · 2026Article
- Social inclusion of people with severe mental illness: a review of current practices, evidence and unmet needs, and future directions.World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) · 2026Article
- The Mental States of Aggressors: A Biopsychosocial Analysis of Workplace Violence Reports in Hospitals.American journal of industrial medicine · 2026Article
- Psychoinflammation: a conceptual framework for peripheral inflammatory phenotypes in mental health.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Beyond the skin: Lived experiences and coping strategies of psoriasis patients in Malaysia.PloS one · 2026Article
- New and old challenges for clinical psychology and psychotherapy toward 2030.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- 5E Mental Health? Notes on an emerging style of thought.Transcultural psychiatry · 2025Article
- Reconfiguring Pain Interpretation Within a Social Model of Health Using a Simplified Version of Wilber's All Quadrant All Levels Framework: An Integral Vision.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Exploring How Ethnoculturally Diverse Surgical Patients and Families Perceive and Deal with Pain Before Hospital Admissions in Ethiopia: Qualitative Descriptive Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Integrating Psychological Insights into Aesthetic Medicine: A Cross-Generational Analysis of Patient Archetypes (IMPACT Study).Aesthetic plastic surgery · 2025Article
- Person-Centredness and Paternalism: The Dance With Power.Musculoskeletal care · 2025Article
- Substance abuse treatment in Nigeria: applying a biopsychosocial-spiritual framework at MACCARCA.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
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Abstract
The biopsychosocial model (BPSM) is increasingly influential in medical research and practice. Several philosophers and scholars of health have criticized the BPSM for lacking meaningful scientific content. This article extends those critiques by showing how the BPSM's epistemic weaknesses have led to certain problems in medical discourse. Despite its lack of content, many researchers have mistaken the BPSM for a scientific model with explanatory power. This misapprehension has placed researchers in an implicit bind. There is an expectation that applications of the BPSM will deliver insights about disease; yet the model offers no tools for producing valid (or probabilistically true) knowledge claims. I argue that many researchers have, unwittingly, responded to this predicament by developing certain patterns of specious argumentation I call "wayward BPSM discourse." The arguments of wayward discourse share a common form: They appear to deliver insights about disease gleaned through applications of the BPSM; on closer inspection, however, we find that the putative conclusions presented are actually assertions resting on question-begging arguments, appeals to authority, and conceptual errors. Through several case studies of BPSM articles and literatures, this article describes wayward discourse and its effects. Wayward discourse has introduced into medicine forms of conceptual instability that threaten to undermine various lines of research. It has also created a potentially potent vector of medicalization. Fixing these problems will likely require reimposing conceptual rigor on BPSM discourse.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.