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The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health
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Physicians of the future: Renaissance of polymaths?

B F Piko

University of Szeged, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, Division of Behavioural Sciences, Szeged 6722, Hungary, piko{at}nepsy.szote.u-szeged.hu

W E Stempsey

College of the Holy Cross, Department of Philosophy, Worcester, MA 01610-2395, USA

Science and technology are crucial in modern medicine; societies devote enormous amounts of time, money and effort to developing new diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. However, the fact that people now report higher rates of disability, symptoms and general dissatisfaction with their health and well-being calls us to rethink the functions of health care and medical education. There is a need for a new medical paradigm, which should involve and reconcile the natural and the social scientific paradigms (‘two cultures’).

Medicine should be viewed as an integrative, biopsychosocial science. Therefore, medical education must involve the study of the biological structures and psychosocial functioning of human beings not as separate systems, but as interactive ones. This mandate suggests that the physician needs to become a sort of ‘neo-polymath’ in a ‘new Renaissance’. The new paradigm, however, should not demand the acquisition of more and more information. Instead, the crucial principle would focus on the appropriate selection of information.

Key Words: Biopsychosocial model • medical education • polymath • theory of paradigm

The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, Vol. 122, No. 4, 233-237 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/146642400212200410
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