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Holistic, and Reductionist Medicine

By 1a2b | July 9, 2010

The major difference between alternative medicine, or what I’ll call holistic health, and Western medicine, is in approach.

A Western doctor, or MD, sees his duty as searching out disease,
diagnosing it, and treating it. If he does that correctly and
effectively, he’s done his job. Most often, this means the doctor
prescribing a pharmaceutical drug or a surgical procedure to remedy
the situation. The patients is passive in all of this.

A holistic health practitioner sees her duty as an educator and a
facilitator. She feels that the body can heal itself, and it doesn’t
necessarily need outside influences (drugs, surgery) to heal from an
illness or to prevent an illness. In holistic health, the patient is
an active participant.

This is the best and the worst thing about holistic health! The
patient is actively involved in the healing process. Everything you
know about your body says that this is the right approach. It makes so
much sense. That’s the good part. The bad thing about this is that
it is HARD WORK for the patient. In most cases, the patient must make
changes to their lifestyle. Change your diet, do more exercise, stop
using sugar, do these stretches, stop negative thoughts, meditate
twice a day, etc.

Making lifestyle changes is immensely difficult. The only time it’s
easy is when you are faced with a life-threatening disease. When you
find out you have lung cancer, it’s pretty easy to quit smoking.
However, it’s far too late by that time. Lifestyle changes need to
come before the illness becomes manifest.

Let’s examine one of the big differences between holistic health and
Western medicine: holism versus reductionism.

Holistic versus Reductionist

This is a major shift in perspective. Taking a holistic perspective
means that you cannot understand a single problem with a single part
of the human body without looking at the whole person. We use the
short-hand “mind, body, spirit” to refer to the whole
person.

This is not how a Western doctor is taught to see a patient. He sees
the patient as the disease. “This is an epileptic,” it is not
a whole person who has epilepsy. He feels that he can administer a
drug or perform a surgery that will cure a person’s liver without
making any difference to the rest of the person. Of course, this is
never possible, so when the inevitable “complications” arise, the
Western doctor deals with those one at a time, often causing
additional problems for the person, whether in body, mind or spirit.

Even those three parts of the person are treated by separate people in
Western society. The body is the domain of the medical doctor. The
mind is the domain of the psychiatrist. Spirit is left to the priest,
rabbi or pastor. There is no overlap in roles, except for referrals
from one to the other. In our bodies, of course, there is tremendous
overlap. A loss of connection to God or the universe will cause no
end of mental and physical problems. Mental stress causes many
physical diseases, as we well know. Who can coordinate between these
in the Western system? No one. Problems falling “through the cracks”
between mind, body and spirit is a common failure of Western medicine.

A holistic practitioner understands the interconnections between mind,
body and spirit. They work on the connections, and, although the
practitioner may not be an expert in all three, they focus on the
overlaps rather than ignoring them.

In my opinion, a holistic approach is better in almost every case for
almost every person. Understanding the linkages between mind, body and
spirit is essential to understanding how to stay well and how to heal.
Western medicine can play a part within the scope of holistic health
by offering emergency solutions to problems that arise quickly and
need to be fixed immediately.


 

 

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 4:59 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Holistic, and Reductionist Medicine”

  1. Bob Ellal Says:
    July 10th, 2010 at 9:14 am

    I used both Western and Eastern medicine in my successful battle against four bouts of supposedly terminal bone cancer in the early nineties. Chemotherapy with qigong–Chinese internal energy exercises. I think a fusion of East and West–the power of allopathic medicine plus the mind/body connection–is “holistic.”

    Bob Ellal
    Author, ‘By These Things Men Live: Chronicles of a Four-Time Cancer Survivor’

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