Positive Health Online

'Holistic' and 'Integrative' Care are terms that have come today to have many meanings in common usage. They could denote:

1. Treating body, mind and spirit in a comprehensive programme for whole person care;

2. Using one or more complementary/ alternative medicine (CAM) modalities, to include their philosophies of care (e.g. Acupuncture in the context of Traditional Chinese Medicine; Homeopathy, Herbalism, Vegetarian diet and Fitness programmes in the context of Naturopathic Medicine);

3. Using complementary/alternative methodologies (components taken from CAM modalities) as adjuncts to conventional medical care (e.g. acupuncture needling for pain; homeopathic remedies for particular symptoms and diagnoses; meditation for relaxation and stress management).

This can often be confusing to careseekers as well as to caregivers – particularly when they are in the early stages of opening to CAM, holism and integrative care. They may actually grasp the less valuable of the alternatives more easily because these are a closer fit with their conventional medical frames of reference. It is less of a stretch to add a methodology in a mechanistic way to treat a symptom – much as one would prescribe a pill or other medical/ surgical/ nursing intervention for that symptom.

I believe this confusion can also be misleading. Caregivers may advertise their practices as holistic, knowing themselves to be in the third category, when careseekers and healthcare institutions don't know the difference between these three levels of holistic care. In some cases, this representation is without the awareness of the practitioner. Coming from a conventional medical or nursing mindset, it may still be seen as a major change to include CAM methodologies in one's practice.

However, from the perspective of those practising at levels (1) and (2), the distinction is quite clear, and holistic practices at level (3) may be short-changing their customers, who do not know they are missing the richness, diversity and depth of healings that may be possible with the higher levels of holistic and integrative care.

One of the major contributions of holistic healing is the participation of careseekers in their own programmes of preventative as well as therapeutic self-care. T'ai chi and Qigong teach gentle exercises and meditations; Naturopathy and Ayurvedic medicine teach careseekers about healthy diets, along with systems of herbal medicines that are far less toxic than western medicines. (This is not just an issue of preference for natural remedies, in these days when conventional medicine has been found to be the third most common cause of death – after cancer and cardiovascular disease.)

Many CAM therapies have rich explanatory traditions that provide a healing philosophy of life along with their remedies and other healing techniques. Traditional Chinese Medicine teaches that everything is relative to everything else, in its systems of yin and yang and five-element explanations for illness. Applied Kinesiology, Medical Dowsing, imagery therapies and many systems of body-mind therapies invite careseekers to explore and develop their intuition – which connects to their inner wisdom for self-healing. Spiritual healing, when it is offered as 'Thy will be done' of as activation of healees' self-healing capacities (rather than as the healer 'fixing' the healee, following the western medical model), invites healees to develop and deepen their personal spiritual awareness.

These aspects of levels (1) and (2) of holistic and integrative care are much more of a stretch for caregivers and careseekers coming from conventional medical cultural traditions. Many careseekers would just as soon turn their bodies over to the experts to diagnose and treat. Many caregivers are caught up in the self-aggrandizement of being the experts who prescribe what are hoped to be cures for symptoms and diseases. It is sobering, however, to know that about half the prescriptions written go unfilled. Even though careseekers come to the doctor expecting and asking for the medicine, they leave with something less than a satisfying prescription.

With a modicum of education for their healees, integrative and CAM therapists often find warm receptions to their offers of instruction in self-care and self-healing. This is empowering medical practice. It is a shift, however, for the caregiver to become a teacher rather than just an interventionist.

All of the above is not said in denigration of the good that conventional medicine has to offer – particularly in the treatment of infectious and surgically corrective disorders. I clearly am in favour of integrative care, which combines the best of conventional and CAM approaches.

I have finally been able to publish Healing Research, Volume II – Consciousness, Bioenergy and Healing: Self-Healing and Energy Medicine for the 21st Century, which provides comprehensive reviews of evidence-based CAM research (137 pp of references), case examples, along with descriptions and explanations of wholistic self-healing, therapist healing and energy medicine.1 In this volume, I make a strong case for:

1. Body-mind and Mind-body healing;
2. CAM therapies in the context of their philosophies;
3. Bioenergy medicine[2];
4. Relationships – of caregivers and careseekers with other people, and with their environment;
5. Spirit.

While many are still debating whether spirit is a figment of imagination or wishful thinking, my own belief is that it is actually the source of our being, manifested in the physical realm through the other levels of being.

To indicate this broader focus, I advocate for using 'Wholistic' instead of 'Holistic'.

References

1. Benor DJ. Healing Research, Volume II (Professional edition) – Consciousness, Bioenergy and Healing: Self-Healing and Energy Medicine for the 21st Century. Medford, NJ: Wholistic Healing Publications 2004.
2. Benor DJ. The implications of E = mc2 for healing and parapsychology, Scientific and Medical Network Newsletter. 12-14. 1990. http://www.wholistichealingresearch.com/Articles/Einstein.htm

Further Information

Healing Research, Volume II – Consciousness, Bioenergy and Healing: Self-Healing and Energy Medicine for the 21st Century by Dr Daniel Benor can be obtained on http://wholistichealingresearch.com/Store/Booknew.asp#v2