[Health diagnosis and health counseling. Traditional risk factors are not in the foreground!]

This article reviews the bio-psycho-social factors of health stabilization and health rehabilitation. It is our aim to improve psychology's and general medicine's cooperation in these fields of research and practice. We, therefore, firstly concentrate on the psychosocial factors which improve health diagnosing and health education; we illustrate health education by selectively reviewing illness-related health trainings. Secondly, we discuss health counseling. Again, we concentrate on the improvement of general practitioner's health counseling. On the one hand, this improvement seems possible on the basis of individual bio-psycho-social risk models. Individual bio-psycho-social risk models, on the other hand, only can serve as a basis for individual-centered interventions, but not for population-centered interventions. After reporting various case histories from different doctor-patient-interactions, we demonstrate the application of bio-psycho-social risk models in the individual case. These applications in the general practitioner's office promise to be useful. Nevertheless, general medicine as well as psychology seem to have only minor interest in intensifying their cooperation.