A DEFINITION OF COMPREHENSIVE MEDICINE.

This article focuses on the definition of comprehensive medicine. The people who are concerned with the teaching of comprehensive medicine find a real need for a precise definition of it. The definitive terms found in the literature, such as the whole person, the person behind the disease and so on are too imprecise. Even if they convey the 'what is' of comprehensive medicine, they do not tell the 'how to.' The comprehensiveness of medicine arises out of the incorporation into medical thinking, teaching and practice of the applicable knowledge of dynamic psychiatry, psychology and sociology. Comprehensive medicine, then, is the conviction, born out of experience, that the medical care of patients can be improved now by the utilization of psychodynamic knowledge and sociological knowledge, along with the generally available biological skills. Perhaps the most significant feature of comprehensive medicine is that it is patient-oriented as opposed to the disease orientation of most of present day medicine.