The dynamics of the organism: implications of recent biological thought for psychosomatic theory and research.

The history of psychosomatic medicine (1) abounds with different conceptual approaches to the understanding of health, illness, and disease and to the care of the sick, alternative to those taken by biomedicine (e.g., refs. 2-5). The psychosomatic perspective on the universe of Medicine has gone by many different names (e.g., biopsychosocial, holistic, human, integrative, patient-oriented, psychobiological). Whether one or another of these labels captures the core theoretical concepts guiding this different view of health, illness, and disease remains problematic.