Facts about Biopsychosocial Model by George Engel
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A psychiatrist and internist at the University of Rochester, Engel developed his model partly in response to his dissatisfaction with the reductionism of the prevailing biomedical approach.
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Inspired partly by systems theory, the biopsychosocial model draws on Ludwig von Bertalanffy's general systems framework to conceptualize hierarchical levels of organization in health.
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Engel used the term 'biopsychosocial' to argue that psychiatry and medicine needed a model capable of accounting for the patient as a whole person.
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The biopsychosocial model holds that biological, psychological, and social factors all interact and contribute to health and illness, rather than disease having a single cause.
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George Engel introduced the biopsychosocial model in a landmark 1977 paper published in the journal Science, challenging the dominant biomedical model.