Theories of disease causation: Social epidemiology and epidemiological transition

Modern Western medicine is based on scientific reductionism, the key assumption of which is that complex phenomenon can be understood by reducing and dividing into smaller parts. The “biomedical model” diagnoses disease in terms of measurable biological parameters, and treats the patient as a biological organism. Although this particular approach has been responsible for tremendous successes in modern medicine, the tendency of the biomedical model to neglect social, economic and psychological factors has been criticized, and alternative explanations have been sought to complement it. This paper presents a brief analysis of these models.