The Biopsychosocial Model

For at least five decades, Science has promoted the biopsychosocial model to guide both personal and program level investments in long term health and wellness, reflecting the biological, psychological, and sociological frameworks that underlie and illuminate our Being.

Medical doctors (MDs), whose didactic training apparently focused on the Bio component, see our Body as a Black Box, to be understood by experimenting on the public at large using drugs, in serial therapeutic fashion.   This approach is seen in Off-Label or non FDA approved uses of drugs, for which scientific justification is lacking.

Additionally, MDs do not actively collect the efficacy/outcomes data from their patients on off-label drug uses to submit to reviewers, including the public. These services, often of ‘low value’, are paid for by personal and public health insurance (e.g., CMS) programs.

Failures to get results, even after years of failed pharmacotherapies, e.g., decades-long opioid prescription escalators for pain, is not cause for lack of payment. Isn’t unthinking capitalism grand?

With these guidelines, the only certainty is that our mental health problems will be likely to persist, i.e., relapse without daily drug use. Adverse outcomes, affecting GI functions and leading to bloat, sexual problems, and weight gain, will also be likely.

American Health + Care programs currently treat mental health conditions as generally incurable without enforcing drug dependencies, denying the public opportunities to explore the efficacy of nonpharmacological options. Under the federalist guideline, state level health+care programs can work with their insurance racketeers (e.g., PBMs) to use funding mechanisms to either deny or restrict payments for these therapies.

Under current laws, without a lawsuit by The People, claiming unequal (financial) access to nonpharmacological interventions, the status quo adherents have no incentive to change. For these reasons, We, the people, have to take a personal interest in, and advocate for, our own maladies in the decades to come.

America’s mental health crisis reminds us of the staggering societal costs, in both economic and cognitive level harms, of our continued investments in unsustainable practices to provide mental health + care to residents.

Scientifically illiterate clinicians and inaccurate diagnostic assessments by clinicians without adequate training, all add to the iatrogenic burdens borne by the public experiencing mental health or cognitive process challenges. The recent case of a man who died at a Providence hospital because the resident MDs were quite clueless about the health crisis he was experiencing is instructive.  The man died after being forced out of the hospital by clinicians who didn’t beleive he needed care, and into a police vehicle.
The police officer in charge had some choice words for the incompetent and careless clinicians involved in this man’s nightmare.  Mental health concerns are now linked to death by cop, in Oregon and the rest of the country.  WE have institutionalized incarceration as the therapy of choice for those experiencing unresolved mental health challenges.

The Portland Street Response team is adding to the public health toolkit by using compassion, rather than command and submit protocols, methods favored by police officers in addressing mental health concerns among people who are confused and unhoused.

Our low communal Health Literacy, which showed up clearly during the pandemic, as surprisingly higher mortality and morbidity related outcomes associated with unwarranted fears of mRNA vaccines, needs improvement.

Not only the public at large, but Oregon’s medical doctors and even a well established chiropractor in Wilsonville claimed that they didn’t support these vaccinations on political grounds.  Absolutely clueless.
Those who tracked Covid-19 outcomes, around the country, during the 2020-2023 period know that the Summer of 2021 was hard on Oregonians.  This happened more than six months after effective vaccines became available to the public, for FREE. Tragic.

With regard to mental health, our current care delivery is a broken process which adds injury to insult, i.e., incorrect diagnoses, by subjecting people to serial pharmacological interventions of an experimental and potentially harmful nature. e.g., off label uses of psychotropic and addictive drugs, like amphetamines being used to treat feel good deficits, and those linked to Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity conditions.
Bad idea, from a TCM perspective since we link these pediatric conditions to correctable imbalances, without using a psychotropic drug. A drug that can lead to lifelong dependency patterns in addition to the unresolved mental health issue.

Oregon has been experiencing a meth crisis that is currently flying under the public’s radar. In 2020, Oregon jumped from having the ninth highest rate of meth use in the country to the highest.

Long term use of powerful synthetic psychotropic medications are associated with increased all cause mortality.