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Health care or body care? Limitations of the biomechanical model of the body in health care delivery
Claire Brown
School of Nursing and Health Care Practices, Southern Cross University, NSW
Abstract
The centrality of the human body to health care is taken for granted. It is difficult to envisage a health care system that did not have as its central focus the human body. However, this centrality is problematic. Firstly, through concentrating on the biomechanical model of the body, other meanings of the body are ignored leading to situations where individuals cannot gain the attention they want and where models of the body from sources other than Western biomedicine are discounted. Secondly, by focussing on individual human bodies, the biomedical model of health care practice is unable to respond to the social factors that are implicated in many health problems.
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