What Does Holistic Health Really Mean?
I really hadn’t heard of holistic health until I was in my early teens. I had been struggling with the symptoms of a bone disorder which meant that I broke easily. This was interfering with my athletic lifestyle and the physicians in my life were less than impressive. A friend of mine said her mother used holistic medicine and that I should check it out.
The first impression that I had was that holistic health was comparable to magic. “They’re quacks,” my mother had stated flatly when I asked her about it. The discussion was closed. Unfortunately, this is the impression that a great many people have when it comes to holistic health, probably from mothers like mine who believed firmly in the pediatrician and forced us to go until we were eighteen.
I was later able to investigate holistic health as a young adult and was rather taken aback by what I discovered. There seemed to be a stronger dedication to actually discovering treatments that worked for someone, even if they weren’t responding to a treatment that worked for someone else. I went to a holistic health care provider with that same friend and it was the first time someone actually listened to what my symptoms were, what I wanted to see changed, and then talked to me about how to go about it. Wow, what a difference that made!
There was no magical cure, but with a blend of different techniques, including Yoga, I was able to strengthen necessary areas while listening to my body in a more productive way. Holistic health is more about allowing the individual to determine a course of health, to embrace their body in a positive balance, and to understand their own body systems in a way that medical doctors generally don’t encourage. It’s about knowing that the ankle bone is connected to the shin bone but that the digestive system is connected as well. (You know that song, right?)
Since I stopped treating just the single bone -and started treating my body as a whole, I have remained break free for nearly ten years now. Under the care of my physician I might have stayed free from bone breakage for about 6 to 8 months.
What holistic health really means, at least to me, is that you have more opportunities everyday to treat your entire body, mind, and spirit so that all of your systems will care for you. Holistic health is kind of like choosing not to smoke because it throws your body’s balance out of whack versus being forced to quit smoking because you just developed lung cancer.
Holistic health has actually been practiced for centuries. At one time it was the only form of health care. Sure, medical science most definitely has its place in our world, but the bottom line is this: those who use holistic health practices are generally less medicated (especially long term) have fewer lifetime trips to the hospital, and are more self aware when their body is off balance which gives them the perfect opportunity to regain balance before illness lands them in bed.
Related posts:
- Move towards holistic health
- Holistic Heath connects the mind and body
- Yoga is useful for health and soul enrichment
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You’re totally right. Holistic health is about figuring out exactly what actually works for the patient, rather than just blindly throwing things at them which “should work.” The one big thing I think you might want to also consider that allows it to philosophically differ from normal medicine is that it puts a much greater emphasis on the sick practitioner having to work to address their health problems. One of the all time best examples of this would be Tai Chi (as outlined in Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body). After the cultureal revolution happened in China, the country was left with dramatically fewer medical resources than were adequate to take care of the population, so in order to solve the problem, they got the top tai chi masters in the coutnry to put together a simplifed national Tai Chi form that could benefit everyon’es health and then mandated that no one could get conventional medical treatment until they had practiced tai chi to fix the problem for a while first (which tended to make over 90% of their health problems go away).
This created a medical system which was able to support it’s population for an infinitely lower cost per person, along with the side effect of not having the elderly population be incapacitated. The whole beauty of this system is that it essentially empowered the people to take care of their own health and put the burden on them rather than an outside party to stay health; and quite fortunately it actually helped ^.^
My own personal hope is that this will spread and gather here and help us enter the next wave of the holistic health revolution (with the previous being the Yoga revolution).