Beyond the biomedical, towards the agentic: A paradigm shift for population health science

Abstract

Life expectancy in the United States is decreasing. Health disparities are widening. Growing evidence for and integration of social and structural determinants into theory and practice has not yet improved outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the fact. In this paper, we argue that the biomedical model and its underlying scientific paradigm of causal determinism, which currently dominate population health, cannot meet population health needs. While criticism of the biomedical model is not new, this paper advances the field by going beyond criticism to recognize the need for a paradigm shift. In the first half of the paper, we present a critical analysis of the biomedical model and the paradigm of causal determinism. In the second half, we outline the agentic paradigm and present a structural model of health based on generalizable, group-level processes. We use the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the practical applications of our model. It will be important for future work to investigate the empirical and pragmatic applications of our structural model of population health.

Keywords: Agentic paradigm; Biomedical model; COVID-19; Causal determinism; Congruence; Population health theory; Structural resilience.