The "holistic" philosophy is a general one which means looking at the whole system rather than reducing it to individual components.
Alternative medicine practitioners often claim that their system is holistic: they treat the patient as a whole and not just as a set of symptoms like conventional medicine does.
Is this true or is it nothing more than a marketing slogan that manages to include an insult to medicine?
The aim of any healing system is to cure disease, not treat its symptoms. This is not always possible as some diseases are not curable; in which case the symptoms are treated. The common cold is a typical example.
The key to curing disease is its accurate diagnosis.
Diagnosis
The real skill in medicine is in the diagnosis. It is the diagnosis that allows doctors to choose an appropriate course of action to treat not just the symptoms but also the underlying cause of symptoms. It is often the symptoms of illness that are the clue to the underlying cause and this is why it’s important to focus on them during diagnosis.
Holistic practitioners are not usually medically qualified. They may build up a detailed profile (case-taking) of the patient, asking questions like, "does piano music make you feel sad?" or "are you generally hot or cold?", but at no time is a diagnosis made of the actual underlying cause of the symptoms. This symptom-profile is used as a form of pseudo-diagnosis. Instead of matching symptoms to an underlying cause, they are taking the emotional responses to symptoms and matching them to their remedies.
In short, holistic practitioners are focusing symptoms and nothing else.
Holism and vitalism.
Vitalism is the belief in a "life force" or a form of "vital energy" that is separate from physical existence.
The idea is that the body is connected to the mind and the mind is connected to the "spirit". It is spiritual disharmony, or a physical condition that inhibits the flow of vital energy through the body, that is believed to be the true cause of ailments. The aim of holistic healing is to harmonise the disrupted life force with the body which will boost the body's self healing processes. The flaw in this model however, is that vital energy has never been detected or shown to exist.
Conventional medicine can say whether a condition is caused by a bacterial infection, a viral infection, an autoimmune response, etc. Holistic practitioners can only diagnose spiritual disharmony such as an imbalance in Yin and Yang or a disruption to the flow of vital energy. This means that conventional medicine can effectively deal with the underlying cause of the condition; whereas holistic treatments rely on time, the body's immune system, and placebo effects to alleviate symptoms.
Conclusion.
The holistic approach of alternative medicine is nothing more than an excuse to avoid medical diagnosis. Alternative practitioners remove this burden by assigning the cause of disease to the realm of spirituality: the one aspect of the mind-spirit-body model that has no evidence to support it.
Claiming to treat the whole person sounds good. In the context of alternative medicine however, it is actually meaningless. The claim is used as a marketing slogan to make alternative practitioners sound virtuous whilst simultaneously attacking conventional medicine.
The irony being: alternative practitioners are more symptom-focused than conventional practitioners.
