What is Holistic Medicine?

A couple of questions to begin with in an exploration of defining holistic medicine are: “How is health different from wellness and How is illness different from disease? In the modern materially based medicine of “western” society, health has become the focus and goal of healing. I would posit that even if a patient is ill they can still be well. It comes down to the “direction” of a patient’s/doctor’s intent in healing. By the same reasoning a disease-free person can still be in a state of illness.

Illness and wellness are on a continuum and intent plays the role of directing the course towards one end of it or the other.

Illness <---------------------------------------------------> Wellness

When a healer considers the whole of a patient, the intent (direction) on the Illness-Wellness continuum can be determined. In a “non-holisic” or materially based medicine, the direction towards illness or wellness could never be determined, only whether the person is diseased or not-disease (healthy). This limit is present because material medicine does not acknowledge the whole of a person’s life. It only acknowledges the materially reality. If the mental state, emotional state, spiritual state of a person is considered, then the “direction” on the above continuum can begin to take shape.

Modern materially medicine is even more “blind” to the concepts of illness/wellness because, the material reality of the concept of the patient is limited to the immediate physical body. Even further limiting is the “Descartian” view of segmenting, into tinier and tinier parts that make up the body. Modern medicine is at a point at which it cannot even determine whether the body is functioning well as a whole. In dissecting of the person into more and more parts, the discarded/disregarded aspects are loss and fall out of importance.

A good example of this is human genome project. One intent of this project, is to elucidate the genes that “control” disease processes. It could be posited that to “understanding” what “controls” disease will never be reached because with each layer into the physical world that is probed, medicine moves another step further from the whole person.

To practice a holistic medicine requires a re-membering of the person. The holistic practitioner needs to break free of the material world and begin to acknowledge and understand the patient on many different levels. This requires a taking into account all the health aspects of a person – spirit, emotional, mental, and physical. Out of this whole consideration, a direction of intent along the illness/wellness continuum can be determined.

One problem with modern day “wholistic” medicine is that the “considerations” are still physically based. While there is a consideration of the whole person it is only on the physical body and its environment. One way around this is to remember that the physical is just one aspect of the whole person. Take the word emotion as an example. From Latin, the root “emote” means to move. There are many things that make up the person, including emotions. To describe breathing we use the word inspiration. When we breath in we have stimulation of the mind or emotions to move us in the act of breathing.

Human beings are more than just a phrenic nerve signal stimulating the diaphragm to contract and causing a breath in. The flesh is one aspect of our manifestations in the world. We are multifaceted. We are not just a thing in space to be poked and dissected; we are a place that must be placed into a context. When this occurs we can once again determine where a person is on a continuum of illness and wellness. We know where there person came from and where they are headed.

You are what you wear: Organic cotton and its impact on your health and the planet!

Appearance is only skin deep…right?

Actually, the answer within our modern world is a definite, “No.”

What we wear changes not only our appearance, but also our long term health especially when what we’re wearing is cotton.

“…but cotton is all natural so its safe, right?”

Not as natural as you think

Cotton is a natural fiber derived from the Gossypium spp. plant and grows best in dry tropical and subtropic climates. The world demand for cotton is huge at 56 trillion pounds per year and keeps increasing annually. Although cotton does grow in tropical places well, the large demand for the crop and the fickleness of the cotton plant for ideal growing conditions production in non-tropical places, makes for cotton production using 25% of the worlds insecticides and 10% of the world’s pesticides^[1] while using only 2.4% of the world's arable land.[2]

During lifecycle from when the cotton first sprouts to when you purchase it in the store, over forty-six different types of insecticides are used. Of these, “Five of these are classified as extremely hazardous, 8 as highly hazardous, and 20 are moderately hazardous”[3] .

Pesticides’ impact on your health

From the beginning to end of cotton textile production, there are impacts on even the healthiest person due to the plethora of pesticides involved. Degradation to health begins in the cotton fields with the health of agricultural workers. Studies have estimated the human impact from pesticides used on cotton to be as high as 20,000 people killed and 3 million poisoned every year[4]. This type of exposure continues from the field to cotton factory mill employees as not only an accumulation of respiratory pollution, but also increasing and persistent pesticide body burden. Pesticide exposure continues into the home with pesticides that arrive on fabric from the clothing manufacturer. In fact the Environmental Working group found that just nine adult volunteers were found to have over 167 pollutants and pesticides in their bodies.[5]

Wearing what you are

So what can you do? You want to be as healthy as you can be. Wear nothing? There is a solution out there and it lies in organic agricultural practices. In organic farming, principles such as crop rotation and an understanding of pest lifecycles are used to eliminate pesticides. You can change your health by committing to buying organic cotton. As your commitment to your health increases along with your individual demand for organic cotton, manufacturers will take notice and increase their use of organic products. In 2004 an estimated 93% increase in manufacture demand for organic cotton. In fact, in 2006, Walmart and Sam’s Club bought the most organic cotton textile products of any retailer.[6] Organic cotton use can not only better your health and wellness, but also improve health and wellness for all inhabitants of the planet.

Resources:

http://www.sustainablecotton.org

http://www.planetearthgreenlabel.com

http://www.pan-uk.org/Projects/Cotton/pdfs/my%20sustainable%20t-shirt.pdf

http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/policy/agriculture_environment/commodities/cotton/environmental_impacts/agrochemicals_use/index.cfm

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[1] Allen Woodburn Associates Ltd./Managing Resources Ltd., "Cotton: The Crop and its Agrochemicals Market," 1995.

[2] Clay, Jason. World Agriculture and the Environment A Commodity-By-Commodity Guide To Impacts And Practices. World Wildlife Fund 2004 pp. 283-305

[3] Soth, J., Grasser, C., and Salerno, R. (1999) ‘The impact of cotton on fresh water resources and ecosystems: A preliminary analysis’, WWF, Gland, Switzerland. preliminary analysis’, WWF, Gland, Switzerland.

[4] World Wildlife Fund. Agriculture and the Environment: Cotton. http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/policy/agriculture_environment/commodities/cotton/environmental_impacts/agrochemicals_use/index.cfm. 2007.

[5] Houlihan, J. Body Burden: the Pollution in People. Environmental Working Group. http://archive.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden1/index.php. 2003.

[6] Volheim, E. “Next to the skin.” In Good Tilth: Organic fibers – Values that you wear. Sept/Oct 2007. p. 4.

What is natural medicine?

Natural... is...Overused. You will find it on anything and everything from toothpaste to sugar...What, sugar!? Yes, I even saw "all natural" on a sugar package the other day at the supermarket. The entire sugar industry is disappointed that the FDA refuses to define the word "natural."

Sugar is natural and is derived from nature, but nothing in nature is ever that sweet. This brings me a bit closer to my current thought of what natural medicine is. Today I had an interesting discussion with my Chinese medicine colleagues on imbalance. In Chinese medicine, there is a line from a classical text stating that "Imbalance is treated with imbalance." What this means is that disease is basically an imbalance of yin and yang and so to bring a predominantly yin disease or yang disease back into balance, the equal but opposite imbalance is needed to restore equilibrium. The more out of balance and further from our equilibrium or true natural state, the more un-natural the intervention has to be to restore balance.

So although sugar is "natural," there is no "natural" high concentration of sweetness like that found in the modern refined white stuff. [side note: researchers find "Intense sweetness surpasses cocaine as reward."] This is how people become can "addicted" to sugar and gain weight from sugar.

The closer we are to nature, the more healthy we are. When we are further from being "in harmony," with natural processes, we are less natural and thus disease starts to develop. Sugar is more natural than Nutrasweet, but sugar is less natural than honey. As I wrote in the last couple of blogs, getting to sleep by 11pm is more natural than staying up all night and sleeping during the day. On the other hand, getting to bed an hour or two after the sun sets is much more natural than staying up until 11pm if the sunset was at 6pm.

Iatrogenic diseases are diseases caused by a medical intervention - especially a physician's. These are often called "complications" or "side-effects" in modern medical jargon or a "healing crisis" or "healing reaction" in natural medicine. Iatrogenic diseases could be interpreted as the side-effects of interventions that are farther from nature than say a more natural intervention. Many modern pharmaceuticals fall into this category. Its used to be that in all pharmacopeias (list of drug actions and chemical make-ups), all the pharmacological substances listed the plant, bacteria, etc that they were derived from in nature. That is no longer so because drug companies can now molecularly characterize the exact shape of a receptor site and synthetically create a drug that can fit the exact shape of the receptor.

Yes, modern pharmaceuticals are very powerful, but since they are in fact very refined and precise yet distant derivative of some substance in nature, they often have many associated undesirable side-effects (The side effects are then treated with more drugs). The same trend holds true for the supplements.

Often times people think that because this or that supplement is "natural" it is free of any side-effects that would be seen with a drug. Supplements are becoming more and more refined as well. A good example of this is "red yeast rice extract." This supplement is used to lower cholesterol and works as well as Lipitor...because red yeast rice extract is, as the name describes, an extract of yeast. This is basically a drug labeled as a supplement. Red rice yeast extract shares many of the same side-effects as Lipitor because it acts exactly the same - as a HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor.

So is a supplement that acts like a drug natural? I would say not if its a refined to an extent like the sugar example above. Remember the ultimate goal of natural medicine is to bring people back into balance in a manner that is the least harmful and thus the closest to a natural physiological process and the rhythms of nature. If we take our cholesterol example, food and exercise can often lower cholesterol significantly. Lifestyle change may be slower, but there are less side effects to eating fiber containing fruits and veggies and exercising daily.

So in order to get better and heal, should we all sell our possessions and live in the woods with only animal pelts to cover us? Not exactly, the ultimate job of a natural medicine practitioner is to guide the patient back to his or her natural state and life rhythms. If you are a child, is it good to sit inside all day and play video games? If you are an adult, is it best to stay up until 2 am watching the "Late Show?" If your a woman in menopause, should hormones be used to create the hormone levels similar to that of a teenager? All of these questions should be answered on whether or not this substance or that habit restores natural physiology and rhythms of life.

The body develops disease because it is trying to adapt and bring itself back into a natural balance. The farther we are from nature, the more imbalanced our physiology becomes and a more diseased state develops.

Natural medicine is restoring a balance back into human beings' lives. Natural medicine is restoring our strong connection to nature and its rhythms.

Until next time,
Gibran