What is Holistic Health Care?
The art, science, and philosophy of Holistic Medicine is inclusive and comprehensive, employing aspects of both conventional western, or allopathic, medicine, and those common therapies that most people think of as alternative or complementry medicine.
Alternative medicine is a popular but ambiguous term that is loosely used to refer to any health care approach that is not commonly taught in conventional Western medical schools. The growing popularity of so-called alternative medicine is due at least in part to an increasingly growing dissatisfaction with conventional care and the effectiveness of many alternative therapies.
Ironically, however, what many of the adherents of alternative medicine fail to recognize is that alternative medicine, like conventional medicine, is primarily focused on treating disease and not necessarily caring for people from the holisitic perspective of body, mind, and spirit. The primary difference in alternative medicine is that, instead of employing drugs and surgery as the chief therapeutic options, alternative practitioners use herbs, acupuncture, or a number of other therapies. These practitioners certainly have their benefit, seeing that deaths due to medicine and medical errors reached as high as the third leading cause of death in the U.S. by some reports, while alternative therapies have little to no risk of death or complication.
But unless the practitioner is treating the WHOLE PERSON - body, mind, and spirit - he or she is not truly practicing Holistic Health Care. A strong emphasis on optimal health also distinguishes holistic physicians from their alternative and conventional brethren.
So a holistic physician focuses on the whole person, rather than isolated parts. These physicians recognize that the body is more than the sum of its parts and that you cannot effect one part of the body without effecting the whole. These physicians shy away from invasive procedures of drugs and surgery as the first line of therapeutic options. Instead of countering the body's symptoms with harsh drugs, they view those symptoms as signs the body is sending out telling something is wrong. These physicians work with the Innate healing Intelligence of the body and their treatments emphasize strengthening the body's natural physiological actions. These physicians work with the body, mind, and spirit as one entity and do not recognize DeCartes's theory that the mind and body are separate.
For more information on the connectedness of the mind and body, a good primer is Molecules of Emotion, by Candace Pert, PhD, former chief researcher at the National Institue of Health (NIH).