Is Holistic Health Care Even Possible?

Pick up any guide to alternative health-care and you will
find a plethora of therapies claiming to be “holistic”. Everyone
today seems to agree that the human being should be treated
as a whole, but does anyone really do it? Is anyone even
capable of doing it?

Allopathic medicine has been severely criticized for treating
symptoms or conditions rather than treating whole people. But
is this really a fair criticism? Medical doctors take histories,
order tests, and perform examinations to find out everything
they possibly can about each whole person before doing
anything else. This sounds very holistic. Allopathic medicine
collectively includes specialities which deal with the structural
(surgery), chemical (medicine), and emotional (psychiatry)
aspects of the people it serves-- and these specialities consult
with each other to come up with a treatment plan that they
believe will best serve each patient. Isn’t that holistic?

Of course not. An individual human being is so mind-
bogglingly complicated that no one doctor or team of doctors,
even given an unlimited amount of time, could ever know
enough about even one unique human being to rationally
determine what his whole system needs at any given point in
time. Doctors are therefore forced to rely on statistics. They
have to reduce all the available information down to something
they can work with. They have to make a diagnosis . That is
the point at which the “patient” becomes a “condition”. It is
also the first point at which the holistic character of medical
practice breaks down, but it is not the only one. For any given
condition, to cite another, there exists a myriad of possible
treatments. Only treatments, however, which have been
proven to be “safe and effective” in a statistically significant
portion of similar cases, can even be evaluated. Ideally, the
most probable treatment is tried first. This necessarily
becomes a matter of trial and error. If the first treatment
doesn’t work, or proves harmful, another is tried, until finally
one may be found whose benefits outweigh its side-effects.

Is this holistic? No--but at least it’s an attempt at it. Is
alternative health-care any better? Taken as a whole,
alternative health-care has the same difficulties to face as
orthodox medicine, but does it solve them? Instead of surgery,
alternative structural methods of care include chiropractic,
massage therapy, and a vast array of different types of
bodywork. Its chemical therapies range from herbal and
enzyme therapy to orthomolecular and chelation therapy.
Alternative emotional therapies exist in which one can work on
his inner child, regress to an earlier time, or let loose a primal
scream. There is even a cornucopia of vibrational therapies for
the treatment of the electromagnetic field of the body.
Homeopathy, flower remedies, and meridian therapy are among
the most widely known. Once again, all the bases are covered.
Every aspect of a human being could theoretically, it appears,
be integrated into a holistic approach using alternative
therapies. The structural, chemical, and energetic (emotional
and vibrational) tools are indeed available, but are they ever
integrated into a cohesive whole? Alternative practitioners
usually consult with each other even less than medical
specialists do. They don’t share the common bond of similar
education. They are often even suspicious of one another.
They are each forced, again by the sheer volume of information
available, to focus only on those aspects of the total human
being which are related to what they know.

An acupuncturist may believe that people are integrated
wholes, but he is trained to listen to symptoms, take pulses,
look at tongues, and move ch’i. A chiropractor might
acknowledge the fact that emotions play a role in health, but
she has been taught to release the innate intelligence of the
body by moving bones. A psychotherapist might understand
the importance of nutrition in the production of
neurotransmitters, but what could he do about it?

It certainly may be true that the average alternative health
practitioner’s personal philosophy is more “holistic” than her
orthodox counterpart, but the same is not necessarily true of
her practice. Even if the entire alternative health community
would band together into an inter-practitioner consultation-
based network, they would only approach the holism of
organized medicine, not surpass it. Alternative therapies may
indeed be safer, cheaper, and more natural than most medical
therapies, but this does not make them more holistic. Neither
does the internal philosophical orientation of its practitioners.

What could it even mean to be truly holistic, to treat each
person as a whole? Such a practitioner would have to have the
ability to evaluate each and every system of the patient’s body
with respect to all of its inter-relationships with every other
system of the body, every possible grouping of systems, and the
organism as a whole. He would then have to be expert enough
in all known methods of therapy to be able to determine which
therapy is most appropriate to the whole of a particular patient
at the particular moment of treatment. If he decided on
meridian therapy, he would then have to be able to decide
which point(s) to treat, for how long and with which modality.
Having done so, our mythical holistic practitioner would be
assessing all the ways in which the first treatment was already
affecting the entire dynamic equilibrium of systems and
subsystems which is the human organism, in order to decide
what to do next. Now that the ch’i is moving again maybe the
body is ready for a structural adjustment, and, if so, where?
Each time an effective treatment is applied, the patient
changes in so many complex ways, on so many different levels
of function that no one, save the patient’s own nervous system,
could ever have enough information at his command to be a
truly holistic diagnostician.

This is the key to understanding how holistic care could be
possible. If we could communicate with the communications
network used by the patient’s body to run the whole dynamic
system, we could merely ask it what it needed to work better.
Statistics would never enter in to it. If the body said it wanted
an herb, we could simply ask, “which one?” The nervous
system of the patient’s body knows exactly what the body
needs to heal itself. It knows the order in which treatments
should be given. It knows when the body has had enough
treatment and needs to integrate what the practitioner has
done. If the nervous system could be accessed, the patient
could direct her own healing process. That would be truly
holistic.

To treat a person as a "whole system" one must be able to
communicate with the "whole system".

The method used to do this is sometimes called "holodynamic
kinesiology" because it seems to be consistent with Bohm’s
holographic paradigm and it grew out of the principles of
Goodheart’s Applied Kinesiology techniques, Beardall’s Clinical
Kinesiology biocomputer model, and dynamical systems theory.

In this method, an “entry” procedure is used to link the doctor and patient
energetically, and to induce the patient’s nervous
system to “display” its needs in a prioritized order as specific
energetic wave-forms in the electromagnetic field of the
patient. It is the flexibility of this procedure which obliterates
the error normally due to the gender specific polarization,
hemispheric lateralization, and inter-subsystem disparity
inherent in the usual kinesiological relationship.
Doctor/patient roles are defined energetically to prevent
inadvertent access of the doctor’s own aberrant wave patterns.
The doctor surrenders, and the patient reclaims control of the
therapeutic interaction.

Once a joint energetic system has been created via a
common linking frequency, and a bidirectional information
loop has been established, the doctor is free to
access whatever is on display in the patient’s nervous system
or electromagnetic field. This is done by placing known
vibrational energies within the field of the patient and
checking for changes in muscle response time. It is postulated
that resonance between two similar energetic fields produces a
harmonic wave addition which causes a response in the
nervous system that translates into a change in muscle
response time. In this way, the human organism can, and does,
ask for whatever it needs in order to cope more effectively with
its environment. It can also ask for the environment to be
changed. It requests structural, chemical, and electromagnetic
corrections as needed. The body literally asks for exactly what
it needs. Specific foods are often eliminated from the diet;
herbal, homeopathic, mineral, and enzymatic treatments are
frequently requested; and the energetic corrections of Chinese
medicine are sometimes involved. Emotional blockages are
almost universally found beneath the surface of longstanding
problems.

Many of the treatments required by the body/mind/spirit of
the patient are consistent with those that would have been
applied by practitioners of statistical Allopathic or alternative
medicine, but many more are not. People with chronic or
acute conditions respond equally well to this type of
individually tailored therapy. Treatments of this nature are
almost entirely natural. The body just doesn’t ask for anything
that is not compatible with the optimal functioning of the
entire system as a whole. It only requests drugs, surgery, or
other radical measures when the system is so severely
compromised that safer methods are insufficient to insure
its integrity. These cases are promptly referred to the
appropriate facilities.

Perhaps the time has actually come for truly holistic
health-care, but this can only happen when the wisdom of the
body can be heard over the dogma of the “experts”.