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Background material by Professor Omar Hasan Kasule for Year 1 Semester 1 Medical PPSD session on 13th August 2008.
Health care based on a holistic medical model is superior to one based solely on the biomedical model.
The biomedical model is invasive, costly, materialistic, narrowly focussed, inflexible, and seeks to control and regiment. Its materialism treats health as a commodity. It dehumanizes and demystifies the body by treating it as a ‘machine’, a ‘thing’ or a ‘physico-chemical phenomenon’. It depersonalizes the patient as a case of pathology and not as a human because it is more interested in the disease and not the person. It allows a technical relation to replace a human physician-patient bond.
Biomedicine is not holistic because it concentrates only on somatic aspects of disease and equates disease to illness whereas the latter is wider in scope. It limits disease causation to pathological anatomy or patho-physiology and rejects or marginalizes spiritual, cultural, social, and psychological factors.
The benefits of biomedicine have been confined to decrease in infant mortality and control of infectious diseases by immunization. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the biomedical model has failed to make a major impact on chronic degenerative diseases because it does not have the tools to change life-style and human behavior. Life-style related emerging and re-emerging communicable diseases like HIV and STD are increasing despite sophisticated biomedicine. This poses a challenge to medical policy makers to explain why most resources for health are allocated to curative services based on the biomedical model when its overall effectiveness is questioned.
The limitations of the biomedical model cannot be overcome until a serious re-examination of its materialistic philosophical background is undertaken.
The alternative to biomedicine is a holistic model of health care delivery based on the tenets of monotheism, universal moral values, purposes of the Law, and principles of the Law. What is preferred is a health care model involving a holistic approach that emphasizes spiritual and social excellence, behavioural and lifestyle change, environmental amelioration, and primary health care (health promotion, and disease prevention).