The Complex Systems Approach. Interdisciplinarity in the Clinical Approach to the Health-Illness/Wellness Process
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22370/lv.2024.30.1.4494Keywords:
complex system, social determinants of health, health careAbstract
Over the years, healthcare practice and curricula in medicine have polarised into two factions: reductionism and holism, which are seen as opposing and unconnected. Proponents of each position still argue about how to approach a person suffering from a disease and the efficacy of its resolution.
In this context, we assessed the applicability of the Complex Systems epistemological framework as an alternative approach to biological reductionism in addressing the health-illness process. According to this framework, the health-illness/wellness process should be modelled as a complex system whose components cannot be sectioned and studied from the individual perspective of each sub-discipline concerned. On the contrary, it consists of a considerable number of variables with multiple dimensions and interactions between them. Therefore, its approach must necessarily be interdisciplinary, and health professionals must approach the subject from an integrative perspective, including the social environment. Biasing the holistic approach leads us to reject the analysis of the individual himself and the properties of the relationships between the subsystems that constitute the system.
Unlike other systemic approaches in the literature, Rolando García’s Complex systems framework is not based on the sum of disciplinary knowledge from different sub-systems but on the integration of interdefinable disciplinary concepts. The difference between this approach and the classical multidisciplinary approach is that integration requires all team members to work together in modelling the theory to create a unified language for the complex system, rather than working from a disciplinary stance and then summing up all viewpoints.
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