Commentary: Moving emergency medicine toward the biopsychosocial disease model

"Medicine has benefitted from greater than 100 years of scientific advancements, leading to academic biomedical centers that have and are continuing to develop new ways of combating a myriad of diseases. Since the Flexner report, medical schools have strengthened and advanced our disease approach with increasingly more information about cellular/intracellular functions. We are on the precipice of personalized medicine and gene therapies. Since I graduated from medical school in 1975, with a solid biomedical foundation, I have seen extraordinary advances: I now actively treat acute myocardial infarctions and acute cerebrovascular “accidents.” I now know I will never see acute epiglottitis because of a vaccine nor will I ever give aminophylline intravenously again because of the steady progress of better drugs. We have made significant advances and eliminated diseases."

This article is part of a special supplement: Inventing Social Emergency Medicine: A Consensus Conference to Establish the Intellectual Underpinnings of Social Emergency Medicine.