Holistic Medicine and Healing
For the longest time, traditional allopathic medicine has only focused on the biological part of a disease in diagnosis and treatment. If you have a headache, you would be advised to take a painkiller or undergo a series of investigations to determine the biological cause before starting the treatment. However, this approach ignores the fact that the headache could be due to other triggers in your life that may be related to your environment.
This is where the concept of holistic medicine comes in. It considers health and well-being as a product of your psychosocial conditions along with biomedical ones. It believes that an individual is the sum of its sub-parts and environment. The interplay of both determines the health and wellbeing of the person and therefore, all of them should be considered when trying to cure them.
It consists of four elements:
1. Person: This is the patient who has a mind, body, and spirit.
2. Environment: This consists of all the external factors that can influence our health. These include family, community, finances, cultural practices, and access to health care.
3. Health: State of well-being achieved through a balance of a person’s mind, body, and spirit.
4. Physician: A person who treats disease by keeping in mind all the aforementioned factors.
Even though the idea of holistic medicine presents a much better alternative to the traditional approach, it is still very rarely practiced worldwide. The reason for that is partly the lack of empathy being taught as an important skill in medical schools. Students are usually only made to understand the way the body works, how disease can occur, and how to diagnose and prognosticate a patient. It makes them view every patient as a ‘case’ instead of a human being.
However, even if a physician is mindful of how other factors in a patient’s life make their disease process complicated, there is only so much they can do. After all, things like family, financial struggles, etc cannot really be altered by the doctor. The best he/she can do is acknowledge their issues because a lot of patients report feeling much more satisfied with their visit to the doctor if the latter listens and responds to them with compassion and empathy.
A holistic approach will require shifts in medical practice, better politics so more people have access to jobs, and supportive cultures and communities. It will take time and a lot of collective effort, but it will hopefully happen one day.
