ABSTRACT
Biomedicine is the study and practice of medical science and includes biology and the physical functioning of the human body. It has for more than a century endured as the principal belief system on which modern medicine and the clinical components of healthcare are built. Diagnosis, the use of evidence-based research and treatments to alleviate illness and the relative abstraction of human experiences all appear central to biomedical thought and praxis. In recent years, social work education and practice have come under the increasingly direct influence of clinical healthcare and medicine, including many of the core political and cultural principles of biomedical science. A key Western belief system and core paradigm shared between biomedicine and social work is positivism. A common criticism levelled at biomedical science remains the formal distance typically generated between medics and patients within discursive fields of praxis.
