Person-centeredness - A Paradigm Shift for Healthcare? From Disease as a “Structural Problem” to Health, Illness and Disease as the “Emergent Outcomes of Complex Adaptive Physiological Network Function”

Abstract

Health and disease are largely seen as structural phenomena - visible changes in tissues and organs, rather than the result of complex adaptive physiological dynamics within the person, constrained by his internal structures and external environments. Health and disease are ecological phenomena; internal structures and external environments provide the landscapes in which the functions - physiological network interactions at the micro and behavioural interactions at the macro level - occur. These interactions are the functional responses in the quest for health and life. Embracing the person as a whole, that is, being person-centered, is thus an expression of a paradigm shift, a shift from the reductionist focus on disease to the complex-adaptive understandings of the person experiencing health, illness and disease.