Models of health and disease

This paper describes and analyses six models of health and disease. These are: religious, biomedical, psychosomatic, humanistic, existential and transpersonal. Of these six models, only one was unequivocally reductionist: the biomedical. The others were all holistic. The religious, humanistic and transpersonal models could be considered as health models, the biomedical, psychosomatic and existential models as disease or illness models. The different models were assumed to depict different, but related, ways of representing health and disease. It is probable that different groups in society, including the different groups in the health service--doctors, nurses and patients--look at health and illness from partly different models. This is considered to have significant implications for the health service.