Psychosomatic medicine, with its prevailing biopsychosocial model, aims to integrate human and exact sciences with their divergent conceptual models. Therefore, its own conceptual foundations, which often remain implicit and unknown, may be critically relevant. We defend the thesis that choosing between different metaphysical views on the ‘mind–body problem’ may have important implications for the conceptual foundations of psychosomatic medicine, and therefore potentially also for its methods, scientific status and relationship with the scientific disciplines it aims to integrate: biomedical sciences, psychology (...) and social sciences. To make this point, we introduce three key positions in the philosophical ‘mind–body’ debate and investigate their consequences for the conceptual basis of the biopsychosocial model in general and its ‘psycho-biological’ part in particular. Despite the clinical merits of the biopsychosocial model, we submit that it is conceptually underdeveloped or even flawed, which may hamper its use as a proper scientific model. (shrink)

Dietary fiber and prebiotics consistently modulate microbiota composition and function and hence may constitute a powerful tool in microbiota-gut-brain axis research. However, this is largely ignored in Hooks et al.’s analysis, which highlights the limitations of probiotics in establishing microbiome-mediated effects on neurobehavioral functioning and neglects discussing the potential of prebiotics in warranting the microbiota's role in such effects.

Psychiatry is a discipline on the border between the biomedical sciences on the one hand and the humanities and social sciences (most notably psychology and anthropology) on the other. This unique position undoubtedly contributes to the attractiveness of psychiatry as a medical specialism for many young doctors, but it also causes significant problems. Unlike other medical disciplines, in which the definitions of diseases are based on objective, measurable pathophysiological underpinnings, psychiatric diagnosis and classification has been based on descriptions of inherently (...) subjective mental and behavioral symptoms that are supposed to be deviant from "normal" psychology or behavior, as reflected in the current .. (shrink)