[The biopsychosocial model in the teaching of liaison psychiatry]

The supervision of residents and the teaching of liason psychiatry to medical students require a special conceptual and practical approach. In our experience the biopsychosocial model not only helps to integrate the biological, psychological and social levels, but also offers an alternative to the physicalist and dichotomizing orientation of biomedicine. Three cases are presented to demonstrate that the biological, psychological and social are interdependent systems, that change in one level produces simultaneous changes in the others, and that the nature of these changes can be therapeutic or iatrogenic, depending on the type of the clinical intervention.