There are other limitations to the disease-as-abnormality model. It assumes that the biological individual is the unit of disease - that is, it is person-centered. However, increasingly, if one adopts a different view, it can be seen that widespread health problems are much more easily understood if they are considered as a breakdown in normal systems function. Systems do not stop at the level of the skin, the human being is an organism that exists in complex levels, constantly exchanging yitself with its environement, chemically and energetically, socially and psy chologically.

A second problem is that the current model of disease is temporaly-bounded. Thatis, it tends to view disese as distcreet, time-limited events, which are therefore discontinuous. However, both phenomenologically and in systems terms, disese events may actually reflect symptoms of more general systems breakdown, such as family breakdown, which itself might be seen as a function of economic decline or war.

A second point is that most disease is not limited to specific systemic models (GI, CNS, CVS) but is instead either self-limiting (If you treat the patient, he gets better in a week; if you don’t treat him, it takes seven days for him to get better), or it is chronic (continuous, fluctuating and, by definition, incurable). Most disease falls into these two categories.