Your Personal Health- Why We Need a Paradigm Shift Now!
What Do We Mean?
As a lifestyle management coach, one of the goals of my blog is to promote a positive shift in the way people think about health, illness, and healing because achieving and maintaining health is an ongoing process. That is shaped both by the context we live, the evolution of health care knowledge and practices as well as personal strategies and organized interventions for staying healthy known as lifestyle management. A paradigm shift or change in the pattern of our health beliefs is ever more urgent now that millions of people around the country and the world are under tremendous amounts of stress as the economy is suffering and unemployment remains high.
Moreover, it is no more news that people who are employed are working more hours and are taking on more responsibilities, for less pay. Those that have lost their jobs worry about paying their bills, feeding their families and holding onto what they have worked so hard to achieve in the past. Some others are owned months old salaries and other live in abject poverty.
Regardless of our circumstances, everyone deserves proper medical and psychological care even when daily habits, career, or family life problems contribute to a decrease in physical health and/or psychological well-being.
What Happens When Medicine doesn’t Work Fully?
In the 19th and 20th centuries, great strides were made in the technical basis of medicine. As a result, physicians looked more and more to the medical laboratory and less to the mind as a way of understanding the onset and progression of illness.
Changing the way people think and cope with aspects of life can move them in a direction towards pain-free living, assist in decreasing blood pressure by learning a few techniques. Applying and believing in this concept will increase people’s quality of life.
The Biopsychosocial model is a major theory of medicine introduced by an American psychiatrist, George Engel (1977, 1980) who recognized that psychological factors (e.g., beliefs, relationships, stress) impact greatly on the recovery, progression and recuperation from illness to disease.
In fact, Biopsychosocial model is a dramatic shift from disease to health (i.e., the biomedical model).The concept of wellness is being stressed and the state of being in good health is accompanied by a good quality of life and strong relationships.
The Bio-Psycho-Social Model of Health -; A Paradigm Shift
Meaning; The idea that the (blank)mind and the body together determine health and illness is know as the Bio-Psycho-Social Model (BPM). The fundamental assumption of the biopsychosocial model is that health and illness are consequences of the interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors (Suls & Rothman, 2004).
The bio-psycho-social model encourages a positive shift in the way people think about health, illness, and healing as it views health, wellness and illness as being a result of several different inter-related factors affecting a person’s life from biological characteristics, to behavioral and social conditions.
In the field of physical health and psychological well-being, Health psychology specializes in exploring biological, psychological, cultural, societal, and environmental factors of life, and how each of these affects physical health.
It was also described by Matarazzo (1980: 815) as the aggregate of the specific educational, scientific and professional contribution of the discipline of psychology to the promotion and maintenance of health, the promotion and treatment of illness and related dysfunction. It is safe to say that health psychology is one of the most important developments within the field of psychology in the past 50 years. What factors led to the development of biopsychosocial model?
Why the Interest in the Bio-Psycho-Social model of Health?
The renewed interest in the mind-body relationship has been fueled by a number of trends within medicine, psychology, and the health care system that have combined to make the emergence of bio-psycho-social model inevitable;these includes;
- The Changing Patterns of Illness; This is the most important factor giving rise need for a paradigm shift in way we view our health.Until the 20th century,acute disorders (short-term illnesses, often the result of a viral) —especially tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other infectious diseases were the major causes of illness and death in the United States and other technologically advanced societies .
- Now, however, chronic illnesses —especially heart disease, cancer, and diabetes—are the main contributors to disability and death, particularly in industrialized countries. Chronic illnesses are slowly developing diseases with which people live for a long time. Often, chronic illnesses cannot be cured but rather only managed by patient and health care provider.
- Why have chronic illnesses helped spawn the need for a paradigm shift in our health belief? First, these are diseases in which psychological and social factors are implicated as causes.
- For example, personal health habits, such as diet and smoking, are implicated in the development of heart disease and cancer, and sexual activity is critical to the likelihood of developing AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). Consequently, health psychology has evolved, in part, to explore these causes and to develop ways to modify them.
- Second, because people may live with chronic diseases for many years, psychological issues arise in connection with them. Health psychologists help the chronically ill adjust psychologically and socially to their changing health state. They help those with chronic illness develop treatment regimens, many of which involve self-care. Chronic illnesses affect family functioning, including relationships with a partner or children, and health psychologists both explore these changes and help ease the problems in family functioning that may result.
- Many people with chronic illnesses use unconventional therapies outside formal medicine (Eisenberg et al., 1993). Understanding what leads people to seek unconventional treatments and evaluating their effectiveness are also issues on which health psychologists can shed light.
- Advances in Technology and Research; almost daily because new issues arise that require the input of psychologists (Saab et al., 2004). For example, new technologies now make it possible to identify the genes that contribute to many disorders. Just in the past few years, genes contributing to many diseases, including breast cancer, have been uncovered. Source: World Health Organization, 1996
- Advances in genetic research have made it possible to identify carriers of illness and to test a fetus for the presence of particular life-threatening or severely debilitating illnesses. This places some parents in the position of having to decide whether to abort a pregnancy—a wrenching, difficult decision to make.
- Treatment Option;Certain treatments that may prolong life may also severely compromise quality of life. Increasingly, patients are asked their preferences regarding life-sustaining measures, and they may require counseling in these matters.
- The increasing attention in Western medicine to traditional East Asian medical philosophies and practices;For example, the Chinese approach to health and illness focuses on the whole person and, rather than regarding a diseased organ in isolation, considers its relations to all the body’s systems. By identifying symptoms and using other diagnostic technologies, the pattern of disharmony that has resulted in illness is identified.
- The goal of treatment is to restore balance, which is often accomplished through treatments such as herbal remedies, acupuncture, massage, exercise, and nutrition. These insights have been increasingly incorporated into Western medical care.
- Therefore, an adequate understanding of what keeps people healthy or makes them get well is impossible without knowledge of the psychological and social context within which health and illness are experienced(Tailor 7).
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