What is the definition of the “Medical Model?”?
Medical model is the term (cited by psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing in his The Politics of the Family and Other Essays) for the “set of procedures in which all doctors are trained.” This set includes complaint, history, examination, ancillary tests if needed, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis with and without treatment. Sociologist Erving Goffman, in his Asylums, favorably compared the medical model, which was a post-Industrial Revolution occurrence, with the conduct in the tinkering trades (watch, radio, TV repair). The medical model also describes the approach to illness which is dominant in Western medicine. It aims to find medical treatments for diagnosed symptoms and syndromes and treats the human body as a very complex mechanism (hence, Goffman’s tinkering trade analogy). Among critics of medical psychiatry, Laing observed that because the diagnosis of a mental illness was based on conduct or patient behavior and not on evident pathology, it (the “diagnosis”) essentially contraven
