["Someone else has to take care of that" - Asylum-seekers' Health Care as a Challenge for Biopsychosocial Medicine].

AIM OF THE STUDY: Medicine has been criticized for over-emphasizing biological aspects of health and disease while neglecting social determinants. However, the last decades witnessed the rise of a strand of medical theorizing that proposed a biopsychosocial perspective on health and disease. This article investigates from ethnographic perspectives the extent to which contemporary biopsychosocial medicine succeeds in providing medical care to asylum-seekers in order to grasp societal influences on health and illness.
METHODS: A mix of ethnographic methods including narrative interviews, semi-structured interviews and participant observation was used.
RESULTS: Using examples of legal restrictions in patients' access to care and language barriers, the ethnographic material showed that physicians regularly failed to take asylum seekers' health-related life-world scientifically into account. Instead, they routinely improvised solutions or deferred responsibility for finding solutions to other agents.
CONCLUSIONS: Approaches employed in the social sciences - especially in medical anthropology - could help alleviate these difficulties that result in sub-standard care, and should therefore be integrated into medical teaching and postgraduate education. Concurrently, theoretical and methodological gaps that might also concern other groups of patients might be closed. © Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.