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.