In 1976, in recognition of this trend, the National Institutes of Health created the Behavioral Medicine Study Section to encourage and facilitate collaborative research across disciplines.
[citation needed] The 1977 Yale Conference on Behavioral Medicine and a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences were explicitly aimed at defining and delineating the field in the hopes of helping to guide future research.
[2] Based on deliberations at the Yale conference, Schwartz and Weiss proposed the biopsychosocial model, emphasizing the new field's interdisciplinary roots and calling for the integration of knowledge and techniques broadly derived from behavioral and biomedical science.
[10] Examples: It is important for doctors to make meaningful connections and relationships with their patients, instead of simply having interactions with them, which often occurs in a system that relies heavily on specialist care.
For this reason, behavioral medicine emphasizes honest and clear communication between the doctor and the patient in the successful treatment of any illness, and also in the maintenance of an optimal level of physical and mental health.
[11] The field has placed increasing emphasis on working towards sharing the power in the relationship, as well as training the doctor to empower the patient to make their own behavioral changes.
Objectives include maintaining professional conduct, productivity, and altruism, in addition to preventing burnout, depression, and job dissatisfaction among practitioners.
[citation needed] Our modern-day culture involves many acute, microstressors that add up to a large amount of chronic stress over time, leading to disease and illness.
According to Hans Selye, the body's stress response is designed to heal and involves three phases of his General Adaptation Syndrome: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.
[citation needed] In a review published 2011 Fisher et al.[12] illustrates how a behavior medical approach can be applied on a number of common diseases and risk factors such as cardiovascular disease/diabetes, cancer, HIV/AIDS and tobacco use, poor diet, physical inactivity and excessive alcohol consumption.