ABSTRACT
Behavioral medicine is a new field in which clinical methods and theories derived from the behavioral sciences are applied to the treatment and prevention of medical illness. Since the early 1970s, behavioral medicine has emerged as a scientific and clinical discipline in its own right. Behavioral medicine developed, in part, out of a growing dissatisfaction by medical practitioners with consultation/liaison psychiatry and its roots in psychosomatic medicine, whose beginnings were in the 1940s, with psychodynamic explanations of specific illnesses (Alexander & French, 1948) and the search for personality factors associated with specific illnesses (Dunbar, 1943). After nearly two decades of research, which for the most part yielded negative results, interest in psychodynamically based psychosomatic medicine began to wane in other ways. Consultation/liaison psychiatry, however, remained useful to medical practitioners in the diagnosis of mental illness in patients who also were physically ill, in treatment by therapeutic and pharmacological means, and in sensitizing clinicians to the need to refine interviewing skills. Although psychotherapeutic and pharmacological interventions were useful to the physician in treating certain psychiatric patients, these methods simply did not address the general needs of the physician confronted in everyday practice with large numbers of patients who had a significant behavioral component associated with their medical illness. These methods disregarded, for example, compliance with treatment regimens associated with chronic illness, the effects of attitudes and beliefs on illness, illness behavior, psycho-physiological disorders, and the impact of health-risk factors in a person’s lifestyle on generating and preventing disease.
