Understanding the Scope and Practice of Behavioral

Family medicine integrates the psychosocial factors influencing health and illness (behavioral, psycho-logical, cognitive, social, and cultural) with biomedical factors. The training of family physicians emphasizes the philosophy widely known as the “biopsychosocial” model of health care.1 Prior to the 1960s, the prevalent view of health and disease was reductionist, focusing on organs and organ systems.2 By the 1970s, a more systematic and empiri-cal evaluation of the interaction between behavior and illness generated a movement to integrate behavioral techniques and conferred credibility on the mind-body relationship. This movement evolved into a discipline now referred to as “behavioral medicine.” In 1977, behavioral medicine was defined as “the interdisciplinary field concerned with the development and integration of behavioral and biomedical science knowledge and techniques relevant to health and ill-ness and the application of this knowledge and these techniques to prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation.”3,4 A broader, and more current, defini-tion comes from the charter of the International Society of Behavioral Medicine, which states that behavioral medicine is “the interdisciplinary field concerned with the development and integration of sociocultural, psychosocial, behavioral, and biomedical knowledge relevant to health and illness and the application of this knowledge to disease prevention, health promotion, etiology, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation.”