Teaching psychosomatic medicine: utilizing concurrent perspectives.

Abstract

Teaching psychosomatic medicine is a challenge in the contemporary medical culture that rewards technology and empiricism. The biopsychosocial model of disease offers an overview about psychosomatic medicine for educating students at all levels of medical training. The teacher can then utilize the various perspectives found in psychiatry to emphasize that the medical model of disease states which concur with the meaningful elements of patient's life narratives, their personality style and possible motivated behaviors fully illuminates psychosomatic illness.