This paper examines holistic medicine as a comprehensive approach to health care that considers the whole person — physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual — rather than focusing solely on disease symptoms. It traces the philosophical roots of holism, contrasts it with orthodox reductionist medicine, and evaluates the shortcomings of conventional medicine in areas of safety, chronic illness treatment, and disease prevention. The paper also explores the rise of alternative and complementary therapies, the resistance within mainstream medicine to philosophical change, the dangers of over-reliance on prescription drugs, and the growing movement toward integrated medicine as a model for 21st-century health care.
Holistic medicine is a system of health care that promotes a cooperative relationship among all those involved, leading toward the optimal attainment of the physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of health. It stresses the need to look at the whole person, including analysis of physical, nutritional, environmental, emotional, social, and spiritual lifestyle values. Holistic medicine focuses on education and personal responsibility in the effort to achieve balance and well-being (What is Holistic Medicine, n.d.).
Holistic health is an approach to life. Rather than focusing on illness or specific parts of the body, it considers the whole person and how he or she interacts with the surrounding environment. It highlights the connection of mind, body, and spirit. The goal is to achieve maximum well-being, with everything functioning at its very best. Within the holistic health model, people accept responsibility for their own level of well-being, and everyday choices become the means by which they take charge of their own health (Walter, n.d.).
Each person is considered a unique individual, rather than simply an example of a particular disease. Disease is understood as the result of physical, emotional, spiritual, social, and environmental imbalance. Healing is seen as taking place naturally when these aspects of life are brought into proper balance. The role of the practitioner is as guide, mentor, and role model. The patient must do the work — changing their lifestyle, beliefs, and old habits — in order to facilitate healing (Frequently Asked Questions, 2009).
Ancient healing traditions in India and China stressed living a healthy way of life in harmony with nature. Socrates warned against treating only one part of the body, arguing that a part can never be well unless the whole is well. Although the term holism was introduced by Jan Christian Smuts in 1926 as a way of viewing living things as entities greater than and different from the sum of their parts, it was not until the 1970s that holistic became a common adjective in modern vocabulary (Walter, n.d.).
Scientific medical advances have created a dramatic shift in the concept of health. Germs have been identified as outside sources that cause disease, and gaining health has become a process of killing microscopic invaders with synthesized drugs. People have come to believe that they can get away with unhealthy lifestyle choices and that modern medicine will fix problems as they develop. Yet for some conditions, medical cures have proven more harmful than the disease itself, and many chronic conditions do not respond to modern medical treatments. In looking for other options, people are turning to the holistic approach to health and healing. The holistic health lifestyle is regaining popularity each year, as its principles offer practical options to meet the growing desire for high levels of vitality and well-being (Walter, n.d.).
Holistic health is based on the law of nature that a whole is made up of mutually supporting parts. A person is a whole made up of interdependent parts — the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. When one part is not functioning well, it impacts all other parts of that person. The whole person is also constantly interacting with everything in the surrounding environment. When an individual is anxious about something, that nervousness may result in a physical reaction such as a headache or a stomachache. When people suppress anger over a long period of time, they often develop a serious illness such as migraine headaches, emphysema, or even arthritis (Walter, n.d.).
The main beliefs of holistic health hold that health is more than simply the absence of sickness. A common way to view wellness is as a continuum along a line representing all possible levels of health. The far left end of the line represents early death, while the far right end represents the highest possible level of wellness, or maximum well-being. The center of the line represents a lack of disease. All levels of illness fall on the left half of the wellness continuum, while the right half demonstrates that even when no illness seems to be present, there is still considerable room for improvement. Holistic health is seen as an ongoing process requiring a personal commitment to move toward the right end of the wellness continuum. No matter what a person's current state of health, they can improve their level of well-being, and even when there are temporary setbacks, movement should always be directed toward greater wellness (Walter, n.d.).
The bulk of illnesses and premature deaths can be traced back to lifestyle choices. There are many well-known dangers connected with drugs, alcohol, nicotine, and unprotected sexual activity. Less familiar is the impact of excesses in things like sugar, caffeine, and negative attitudes. These factors, combined with deficiencies in exercise, nutritious foods, and self-esteem, gradually accumulate harmful effects. Over time they diminish the quality of the internal environment of a human being and can set the stage for illness to take hold (Walter, n.d.).
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that the key factors influencing an individual's state of health have not changed significantly over the past 20 years. Quality of medical care accounts for 10%, heredity for 18%, and environment for 19%. Everyday lifestyle choices make up 53%. The decisions that people make about their life and habits are therefore, by far, the largest factor in determining their state of wellness (Walter, n.d.).
The most obvious choices people make each day surround what they consume — both physically and mentally. The cells in a person's body are constantly being replaced with new ones, and new cells are built from what is available. A lack of necessary building blocks can result in imperfect cells that are unable to maintain health. On the non-physical level, a person's mental attitude is shaped by what they see and hear (Walter, n.d.).
While preventing illness is important, the main focus of holistic health is on reaching higher levels of wellness. The right half of the wellness continuum involves constantly exploring what everyday actions work for a person and discovering what moves them toward maximum well-being. People are motivated by how good it feels to have energy and enthusiasm for life, and by the knowledge that their daily choices will support that vitality for years to come (Walter, n.d.).
When an illness or chronic condition does present itself, the holistic approach to healing goes beyond merely eliminating surface symptoms. In holistic medicine, a symptom is considered a sign that something needs attention — a guide for looking below the surface to identify the root cause of the problem, so that the real issue can be addressed. Holistic health strives to reach higher levels of wellness while preventing illness, and people are motivated to continue this process throughout their lives as they experience the benefits of positive lifestyle changes (Walter, n.d.).
A holistic practitioner:
1. Views the patient as being ultimately responsible for his or her own well-being.
2. Fosters and maintains a partnership with the patient, using therapies with which both feel comfortable and that are effective.
3. Evaluates and recommends treatment options that address the cause of an illness, along with its symptoms.
The holistic practitioner will choose or recommend from a variety of both conventional and alternative treatments and therapies. The practitioner and the patient often work together to develop an optimal course of treatment. This partnership is a powerful approach to healing and is the foundation of the holistic philosophy (Frequently Asked Questions, 2009).
Complementary and alternative therapies are those not considered mainstream and not normally offered by conventional medical personnel. These include nutrition, herbal medicine, spinal manipulation, bodywork medicine, energy medicine, spiritual attunement, relaxation training, stress management, biofeedback, and acupuncture. This list is constantly changing as more research becomes available. As therapies demonstrate effectiveness and safety, they become part of conventional medicine (Frequently Asked Questions, 2009).
Holistic medicine is primarily distinguished by its concept of health. Physicians in orthodox medicine tend to assume that people who are not sick are by definition healthy. Sickness usually means the patient is complaining of something, or that the physician has discovered some abnormality through examination or testing. Even if the patient has a complaint, if the doctor cannot find an abnormality after extensive testing, the patient is still presumed to be healthy by virtue of the absence of verifiable evidence of abnormality. Health is thus considered to be merely the absence of illness (Rosch, n.d.).
The holistic definition of health, by contrast, describes health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being — not merely the absence of disease. This is a positive definition that provides individuals with something to actively strive toward. It is inherently different from promoting health by simply avoiding sickness. In this context, one may view the lack of health at five levels: dissatisfaction, discomfort, disability, overt disease, and death or dying (Rosch, n.d.).
While these might normally be viewed as progressive and increasingly severe stages of illness, they may be accorded equal weight on a holistic scale that measures total health. Another distinction that follows from this is the difference between normal and average. Much of the recognition of disease in orthodox medicine is based on the observation of an abnormal finding. While such a deviation suggests illness, it is an error to assume automatically that a normal finding implies health. Normal values are generally determined from surveys of Americans presumed to be healthy — many of whom, however, are afflicted with hypertension, ulcers, arthritis, or obesity, or have habits that are anything but healthy. What is required is a concept of optimal health: the best achievable state of total wellness for a given individual (Rosch, n.d.).
In order to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of both systems, it is necessary to consider the implications and limitations of their underlying philosophies. Practitioners of holistic medicine, guided by the philosophy of holism, strive to attain optimum health and believe that the cause of ill health begins with the environment and fundamental nutritional factors. Practitioners of orthodox medicine, guided by the philosophy of reductionism, aim not to attain optimum health — a concept in which they do not believe — but rather to eliminate symptoms of specific diseases, predominantly through the use of symptom-suppressing drugs and through the surgical removal or replacement of diseased tissues or organs. Whereas holism is fundamentally supportive, cause-based, and preventative, reductionism is primarily interventionist and symptomatic, and plays little or no role in prevention (Holistic Medicine or Reductionism, n.d.).
It has been said that a paradigm shift is occurring in our health care system as alternative medicine begins to compete with orthodox medicine for dominance. Although it has been suggested that nutritional therapy and environmental medicine are now part of orthodox medicine, and despite increasing grassroots support for alternative medicine, there remains an enormous gap to bridge before orthodox medicine faces any real threat to its dominance. Since practitioners of orthodox medicine do not appear to be any closer to abandoning their reductionist, interventionist approach than they were two or three decades ago, it seems more likely that there will be integration rather than a true paradigm shift. This newly emerging model has been called integrative medicine. Integrative medicine can only be regarded as a desirable and positive change insofar as it establishes and consolidates a genuine respect for the principles of holism and an appreciation of the whole truth (Holistic Medicine or Reductionism, n.d.).
While the upsurge in the popularity of alternative medicine is consumer-driven — largely as a result of the perceived hazards and limitations of orthodox medicine — there are those who claim that the alternative health movement is an ideological movement connected to post-modernism and globalization. Given that evidence-based medicine would normally be considered firmly grounded in modern scientific concepts, it is notable that there is little scientific basis for many practices utilized by orthodox medicine, while conversely, the practice of alternative medicine is not without some scientific support (Holistic Medicine or Reductionism, n.d.).
The determination with which mainstream medicine and science has sought to discredit alternative medicine has been considerable. This type of hounding and deregistration of nutritionally oriented doctors has continued in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Although globalism and interdependence are fundamental aspects of post-modernism, this stands in contrast to holistic medicine, which is rooted in self-empowerment and self-sufficiency (Holistic Medicine or Reductionism, n.d.).
The importance of understanding underlying philosophical concepts is highlighted by the inability of modern medicine to fully explain the effectiveness of therapies such as acupuncture from a scientific viewpoint. Orthodox medicine remains determined not to accept the philosophy upon which acupuncture is based. The determination with which modern medicine seeks to preserve its current reductionist paradigm is arguably the single greatest obstruction to positive change and to any genuine integration with alternative medicine (Holistic Medicine or Reductionism, n.d.).
Many medical authorities still refuse to openly admit the shortcomings of modern medicine, perhaps even claiming that orthodox medicine has proved effective and that most Americans are healthier than ever before. Any suggestion that the effectiveness of modern medicine is such that fundamental change is unnecessary is simply inconsistent with the facts (Holistic Medicine or Reductionism, n.d.).
"Safety failures, chronic disease, and resistance to reform"
"Nutritional therapy benefits versus prescription drug overuse"
"Argument for merging orthodox and alternative approaches"
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