Family systems medicine: what´s in a name

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, M. Graça
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Outros Autores: Smith, Thomas Edward
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/6903
• topic: Family systems medicine; Biopsychosocial medicine; Medicina familiar sistémica; Medicina biopsicossocial

Family Systems Medicine as an interdisciplinary field was coined in 1983 having at its core the biopsychosocial model and a "systems language". This newfield is interdisciplinary and includes the contribution of family medicine, family therapy and systems theory. Family Medicine is committed to the care of the "whole"person in the contexto the famiIy, rather than the perpetuation of organ and disease based medicine. As a recent discipline, family medicine is in the process of developing an identity for itself. Family therapy is characterized by a focus on holistic and contextual language and like family medicine speaks from a nonreductionist approach providing the necessary tools to address the patient-in-context. Systems thinking allows the family physician to expand from the pure individual biomedical model to the multicausal, interactional approach allowing the physician to shift from the individual to the family as the unity of care. This paper addresses important issues at the core of family systems medicine: collaboration between the disciplines involved, its contribution to biopsychosocial medicine differences in focus between family systems medicine, psychosomatic medicine, behavioral medicine and health psychology and finally the evolution of the field .