For at least the last sixty years, Western medicine has been dominated by pharmaceutical drugs. And regardless of your views on prescription drugs, no one can really call that a holistic approach to medicine. The whole concept of pharmaceuticals is to manipulate a chemical response in the body without worrying about what is causing that response.
This is why people rarely get better when dependent on prescription drugs, and why the drugs themselves are often more dangerous than the chemical response they are trying to correct. In some cases, of course, like with antibiotics, we’ve seen some life-saving results. But even in these cases, the approach by definition is not holistic.
Holistic health refers to considering the body as a whole when it comes to maintaining health or using corrective health solutions. Now, I don’t know if any holistic health treatment, remedy, nutritional solution, etc. could address all aspects of the body at once. You can treat inflammation throughout the body, or you can get a broad spectrum of nutrients into cells throughout the body, but these or any other solution would not provide all the things the body needs.
Therefore, a holistic solution does not mean providing everything that is needed at once, and it does not mean correcting everything at once. It just means that you are considering the needs of the whole body at once. So when you provide a holistic service, remedy, nutritional, etc., you will benefit certain aspects of the body. and will not harm any other part of the body. And, of course, by correcting one aspect of the body, that aspect begins to do its job correctly, which affects other aspects of the body and there is a positive effect.
Again, comparing this to pharmaceuticals, an antibiotic can kill certain bacteria in the body that cause symptomatic problems; but it will also kill beneficial life in the body, which leads to other problems. A holistic approach to bacteria would be to find the cause of the bacteria and eliminate that cause (while possibly strengthening the body’s ability to eliminate harmful bacteria in its own way).
A true holistic approach would also recognize the body as more than just a mechanical device. I would look at physical health from a chemical and quantum perspective, as the quantum (subatomic) biofield directly affects the chemical interactions that occur in the body. I also believe that this biofield is the medium through which our thoughts and emotions affect our physical bodies, and both thoughts and emotions must be considered in the holistic approach.
(By the way, this is one of the reasons why certain remedies or techniques are more appropriate for some people, while other people need other approaches; clients of holistic practitioners need to feel comfortable with what is being done and they must have as much mental understanding as they wish). I want to have on what is happening. No one should be pressured by friends or practitioners to try a technique.)
Finally, most holistic practitioners and clients will believe in a spiritual aspect of the individual, and this too must be considered as part of the holistic approach. However, a few things need to be said about this. First, a balanced holistic practitioner would never feel the need to force a certain spiritual point of view on a client due to the negative effect this would have on the mind and emotions and therefore potentially physical health.
Second, a practitioner who does not believe in spirituality still needs to be open to the client’s beliefs, if only because those beliefs affect the person’s mental and emotional well-being. Ignoring these beliefs is not looking holistically at the person.
Third, we must be careful about talking about “spiritual healing” and “energy healing” in the same way. They are different. Reiki, for example, is an energy healing technique in which the client’s “life force” energy (ki or chi) is manipulated to bring about self-healing. The force that Reiki is supposed to work with is the omnipresent quantum field (one aspect of which is an individual’s biofield), which is part of the physical world. (This is why it is studied by quantum physicists rather than theologians.)
Spiritual healing, on the other hand, is meant to be based on the spiritual life of God and/or the passing soul. inside the quantum field and therefore vivifying health. This would include techniques such as esoteric healing, and should be used for those clients with the appropriate belief system.
Just as any technique for the physical (chemical) body will not directly address all aspects of the body, but indirectly affect many, any physical technique will affect the quantum field, the emotions, the mind, and perhaps the soul. Any emotional technique will affect the physical, quantum, mental and perhaps soul aspects.
So a holistic point of view understands that every object and every event affects every other object and every other event in some way, no matter how subtle. When we keep this in mind, we better grasp the vast power of each choice. And when we look at holistic health techniques, we can know that each positive choice is simply a step in the larger scheme of things. But in the end it is a step towards better health.
