A Question That Strikes at the Core of a Timeless Philosophical Divide . . .
Psychosocial vs. Physiologic: Clarifying the Diagnostic Divide in Orofacial Pain
You’re right to observe that the bio-psychosocial model, as taught in many OFP programs, often leans heavily toward medical and psychological interventions.
- In practice, this can mean a reliance on pharmacology, cognitive behavioral therapy, and interdisciplinary referrals — sometimes at the expense of structural clarity and physiologic restoration.
- The Psychosocial model’s strength lies in its validation of pain as a subjective, multifactorial experience. But its weakness, as you noted, is that it can drift into diagnostic abstraction — naming syndromes without anchoring them to functional causality.
Two Opposite Directions of Causation
