Understanding ‘Family’ for Family-Oriented Medical Care

ABSTRACT

The clinical philosophy of family medicine is to provide warm-hearted health care to every human being as opposed to the modern subspecialized carecalled “inhuman medicine.” One of the strategies to implement this philosophy is comprehensive care. Comprehensive care uses the biopsychosocialmodel approach to health problems. Comprehensive evaluation and management of biopsychosocial dimensions is unique to family medicine, andit is difficult to achieve through subspecialized care. Family-oriented health care is a specific tool to practice comprehensive care based on thebiopsychosocial approach. For family-oriented medical care, the family physician needs to understand “family” from two perspectives structural anddevelopmental. From the structural perspective, family is a group of small entities called holons. From the developmental perspective, family is anentity that keeps changing and developing through the family life cycle and events. Family-oriented care, in these two contexts, tries to understandand address the communication and behavior patterns of the family members.