Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: A new model of care to return holism to family medicine Family medicine's leadership in primary care is slipping as it loses its vision of whole-person care.This model of care can help us better manage and combat chronic disease.H ere is our problem: Family medicine has allowed itself, and its patients, to be picked apart by the forces of reductionism and a system that profits from the sick and suffering.We have lost sight of our purpose and our vision to care for the whole person.We have lost our way as healers.The result is not only a decline in the specialty of family medicine as a leader in primary care but declining value and worsening outcomes in health care overall.We need to get our mojo back.We can do this by focusing less on trying to be all things to all people at all times, and more on creating better models for preventing, managing, and reversing chronic disease.This means providing health care that is person centered, relationship based, recovery focused, and paid for comprehensively.I call this model Advanced Primary Care, or APC (FIGURE).In this article, I describe exemplars of APC from across the United States.I also provide tools to help you recover its central feature, holism-care of the whole person in mind, body, community, and spirit-in your practice, thus returning us to the core purpose of family medicine. Holism is central to family medicineMore than 40 years ago, psychiatrist George Engel, MD, published a seminal article in Science that inspired a radical vision of how health care should be practiced.1 Called the biopsychosocial model, it stated what, in some ways, is obvious: Human beings are complex organisms embedded in complex environments made up of distinct, yet interacting, dimensions.These dimensions included physical, psychological, and social components.Engel's radical proposition was that these dimensions are definable and measurable and that good medicine cannot afford to ignore any of them.
Source: The Journal of Family Practice
DOI: 10.12788/jfp.0110
Author: Jonas
Language: English
Subfield: General Health Professions
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3148653714