The pioneering U.S. internist and psychiatrist George Engel argued nearly half a century ago that the “crippling flaw” of modern medicine “is that it does not include the patient and his attributes as a person. Yet in the everyday work of the physician the prime object of study is a person.” We must make provision for the whole person in their full “psychological and social nature,”1 he said, calling for a biopsychosocial approach: one that recognizes the unity of emotions and physiology, knowing both to be dynamic processes unfolding in a context of relationships, from the personal to the
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