What are advantages of the social model of health?

Answer 1

It allows those who are in positions of authority to assert power over the psychosocial aspects of the lives of others.

The recent UK Welfare reforms show how this can be advantageous to the insurance industry, governments wanting to reduce spending for the sick and disabled, and those researchers willing to make money from this.

The benefits of biopsychosocial management to patients seem limited to changes in scores for subjective self-report outcome measures, in a way similar to that which we see with dubious CAM approaches.

While it's possible to construct abstract theoretical tales of clinicians carefully working to understand and improve how the biological, psychological and social components of people lives come together to affect their health, in reality we have such a poor understanding of these areas that allowing others to medicalise the psychosocial aspects of people's lives routinely leads to problems, and can be taken advantage of by those whose interests differ from the people actually being managed.

Answer 2

Prevention is better then cure