Theoretical tensions in biopsychosocial medicine.

Orthodoxy traditionally manages to control the potential threat from the unorthodox by a strategy of either marginalisation or incorporation. Having for so long marginalised the social sciences, biomedicine now seeks to incorporate them in a new biopsychosocial alliance. The social sciences should resist such blandishments and, rather than act in complicity with biomedicine, be free to pursue a more critical role in exposing the theoretical and empirical inconsistencies in the biomedical model.