Medical complexity

From NECSIWiki

Complexity in medicine has been long appreciated but poorly understood. Clinicians build experience over year. Good clinicians gain an intuitive sense of the vast complexity and unpredictability of human life and health. Biological, psychological, and social processes entwine in a sum experience of human health.

George Engel, a Johns Hopkins- and Harvard-trained physician, proposed the Bio-Psycho-Social model of human health after work in the 1950's and '60's. This model gained more currency in the 1970's with the growth of the Family Practice model of generalist physician training in the United States. Family physicians' exploration of family systems theory began to incorporate systems thinking in health theory.

Socioeconomic change in U.S. health care and physician training programs since the 1990's may have slowed progress in this field. The field of family medicine has, however, shown recent renewed interest in complexity science and its many cousins - chaos, catastrophe, fractal physiology, and others.

Recent theoretical work and additional citations will be added shortly.