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. Applications An example of how to apply the biopsychosocial model that behavioral medicine utilizes is through chronic pain management. Before this model was adopted, physicians were unable to explain why certain patients did not experience pain despite experiencing significant tissue damage, which led them to see the purely biomedical model of disease as inadequate. However, increasing damage to body parts and tissues is generally associated with increasing levels of pain. Doctors started including a cognitive component to pain, leading to the gate control theory and the discovery of the placebo effect. Psychological factors that affect pain include self-efficacy, anxiety, fear, abuse, life stressors, and pain catastrophizing, which is particularly responsive to behavioral interventions. In addition, one's genetic predisposition to psychological distress and pain sensitivity will affect pain management. Finally, social factors such as socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity also play a role in the experience of pain. Behavioral medicine involves examining all of the many factors associated with illness, instead of just the biomedical aspect, and heals disease by including a component of behavioral change on the part of the patient. In a review published 2011 Fisher et al 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. Evidence indicates that behavioral interventions are cost effectiveness and add in terms of quality of life. Importantly behavioral interventions can have broad effects and benefits on prevention, disease management, and well-being across the life span. See also Health psychology Organizational psychology Medical psychology Occupational health psychology Journals Annals of Behavioral Medicine International Journal of Behavioral Medicine Journal of Behavior Analysis of Sports, Health, Fitness and Behavioral Medicine Behavior Analyst Online Journal of Behavioral Health and Medicine Behavior Analyst Online Journal of Behavioral Medicine Organizations Association for Behavior Analysis International's Behavioral Medicine Special Interest Group Society of Behavioral Medicine International Society of Behavioral Medicine References Interdisciplinary subfields Epidemiology Neuroanatomy Health