Biopsychosocial

I went to Prof Chew-Graham's inaugural lecture this week, and it was really interesting so I want to write it up. Prof Chew-Graham is a professor of what's called "Primary Care Sciences", which basically means studying how GPs work. Inaugural lectures can be a bit odd, because they're public events and are meant to be pitched to a general audience, but they're a celebration of someone being made a professor so the subject matter usually has something to do with highly specialized and technical research. Anyway I found Prof Chew-Graham's talk really fascinating; just the list of stuff she's researched in her illustrious academic career brought up some really thinky issues.

I'm not going to transcribe the whole talk; a lot of it was biographical. But I do want to talk about some of the themes that Prof Chew-Graham brought out, because they're really interesting and I think relevant to several of you. Basically she had some really interesting observations about the relationship between medical professionals, particularly GPs and practice nurses, and patients who have long-term medical problems that can't be explained or treated adequately, notably mood disorders and chronic pain conditions.

( doctoring )

I hope I've been respectful in bouncing ideas around sparked off by Prof Chew-Graham's lecture. I don't myself have any chronic illness, mental illness or disability, so this is speculation coming from a place of ignorance. I am very much open to be told that I'm talking offensive nonsense here.