The rhetoric and reality of psychosocial theories of health: a challenge to biomedicine?

Textbooks in health psychology and medical sociology describe these disciplines as a challenge to the biomedical model. In particular, they purport to contest biomedicine's concepts of illness causality, a dualistic individual and outcomes. This article examines support for this 'rhetoric' and examines the discrepancy between the stated aims of these disciplines and the 'reality' of their explanatory frameworks. In addition, this discrepancy is analysed in terms of the implicit acceptance and privileging of a biomedical perspective within psychosocial theories. The article then examines explanations for this discrepancy first in terms of the potential function of the 'rhetoric' and then in terms of the reflections of this rhetorical challenge in the construction and dissolution of the boundaries of the human body.