Behavioural Medicine and its developments
Lucio Sibilia
A history of the most prominent scientific developments of Behavioural Medicine (BM) is outlined,
from its beginnings in the ‘70s up to today. Behavioural Medicine has been involved in almost
every branch of Medicine so far, and this paper aims to show the basic reasons. As an autonomous
multi-disciplinary area, Behavioural Medicine emerged as a convergence of new problems with new
opportunities: the spreading of chronic-degenerative diseases, the failure of psychosomatics, and
the rising costs of medical care could intercept the success of behaviour therapies, the spreading
of bio-feedback (BFB) and the developments of behavioural sciences. Health behaviours received a
paramount interest; examples are drawn from the fields of behavioural cardiology and obesiology.
Afterwards, the dissemination of research studies on stress, and a rising interest towards a
salutogenetic paradigm rather than the dominant pathogenetic paradigm allowed integration of
several experimental contributions with a more social and cognitive orientation, giving rise to a
scientific change, called Psychosocial Medicine. This new label covers a less-defined area, whilst still
largely overlapping with Behavioural Medicine, where a clearer affirmation of the bio-psychosocial
model (BPSM) can be seen, already implicit in the well-known definition of health from the WHO
(1948).
Keywords
History of science, Behavioural Medicine, Psychosocial Medicine, Salutogenetic
paradigm, Biofeedback, Health behaviours, Stress, Bio-psychosocial model.
