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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences
Self-Organizing Biopsychosocial Dynamics And The Patient-Healer Relationship, David Pincus
Self-Organizing Biopsychosocial Dynamics And The Patient-Healer Relationship, David Pincus
Psychology Faculty Articles and Research
The patient-healer relationship has an increasing area of interest for complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) researchers. This focus on the interpersonal context of treatment is not surprising as dismantling studies, clinical trials and other linear research designs continually point toward the critical role of context and the broadband biopsychosocial nature of therapeutic responses to CAM. Unfortunately, the same traditional research models and methods that fail to find simple and specific treatment-outcome relations are similarly failing to find simple and specific mechanisms to explain how interpersonal processes influence patient outcomes. This paper presents an overview of some of the key models …
Methodological Implications Of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Models For Whole Systems Of Complementary And Alternative Medicine, Iris R. Bell, Mary Koithan, David Pincus
Methodological Implications Of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Models For Whole Systems Of Complementary And Alternative Medicine, Iris R. Bell, Mary Koithan, David Pincus
Psychology Faculty Articles and Research
This paper focuses on the worldview hypotheses and research design approaches from nonlinear dynamical complex systems (NDS) science that can inform future studies of whole systems of complementary and alternative medicine (WS-CAM), e.g., Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, and homeopathy. The worldview hypotheses that underlie NDS and WS-CAM (contextual, organismic, interactive-integrative - Pepper, 1942) overlap with each other, but differ fundamentally from those of biomedicine (formistic, mechanistic). Differing views on the nature of causality itself lead to different types of study designs. Biomedical efficacy studies assume a simple direct mechanistic cause-effect relationship between a specific intervention and a specific bodily outcome, …
A Complex Systems Science Perspective For Whole Systems Of Complementary And Alternative Medicine Research, Mary Koithan, Iris R. Bell, Kathryn Niemeyer, David Pincus
A Complex Systems Science Perspective For Whole Systems Of Complementary And Alternative Medicine Research, Mary Koithan, Iris R. Bell, Kathryn Niemeyer, David Pincus
Psychology Faculty Articles and Research
Whole systems complementary and alternative medicine (WS-CAM) approaches share a basic worldview that embraces interconnectedness; emergent, non-linear outcomes to treatment that include both local and global changes in the human condition; a contextual view of human beings that are inseparable from and responsive to their environments; and interventions that are complex, synergistic, and interdependent. These fundamental beliefs and principles run counter to the assumptions of reductionism and conventional biomedical research methods that presuppose unidimensional simple causes and thus dismantle and individually test various interventions that comprise only single aspects of the WS-CAM system. This paper will demonstrate the superior fit …