Following McWhinney’s footsteps: from family medicine to traditional and complementary medicine

• Autor(a) principal: Norman,Armando Henrique
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Tesser,Charles Dalcanale
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Interface (Botucatu. Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1414-32832019000100284
• topic: Primary Health Care; Family practice; Homeopathy; Complementary therapies; Health promotion

Family physicians have developed a holistic approach to patients’ care which can facilitate a mutual understanding of different Traditional and Complementary Medicine (T&CM) practices. This analytical paper considers three intertwined issues: (1) Ian McWhinney’s critique of biomedical abstractions (i.e., disease categories); (2) The similarity between the cosmology of family medicine’s organismic thinking and homeopathy’s vitalism as an example of T&CM; and (3) The gradient of explanatory models (EMs) to delineate the space within which T&CM can be applied to patients’ care. In primary health care predominates a blend of physiopathological and semiological EMs comprised of low to moderate risk patients. In this scenario, the introduction of T&CM practices can enhance family physicians’ therapeutic scope. Thus, the combination of gradient of EMs, primary health care attributes, and family physicians’ professionalism can provide the required safe environment for implementing T&CM services.