ABSTRACT
Medical family therapists must be familiar with illness and its effects on individuals and families, they must understand the medical system and how to work collaboratively with medical providers, and they must be familiar with techniques that assist families in coping with the unique stress illness places on them. This chapter reviews these areas, beginning with the various settings in which medical family therapy is likely to be practiced. The primary theoretical underpinning of medical family therapy is systems theory and the biopsychosocial model. Medical family therapists must be willing to bridge the largely separate worlds of mental healthcare and medical care. They must be willing to be “a stranger in a strange land” and learn about medical culture to constructively work in a different set of mores and traditions. Medical family therapists also benefit from a collaborative approach with the families themselves.
