What is the Difference between Conventional & Holistic Medicine?

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What is the Difference Between Conventional and Holistic Medicine?

 

Standard, conventional, or orthodox medicine, also called allopathy, --

defines health as the absence of disease. This definition is based on a

negative.

 

In contrast, holistic medicine concurs with the definition of health

used by the World Health Organization (WHO), which posits that it is

a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.

 

" Despite the insights of some eminent doctors, medicine still

focuses on disease, giving it a failure orientation.

 

Its practitioners still act as though disease catches people, rather

than understanding that people catch disease by becoming susceptible

to the seeds of illness to which we are all constantly exposed.

 

Although the best physicians have always known better, medicine as a

whole has rarely studied the people who don't get sick.

 

Most doctors seldom consider how a patient's attitude towards life shapes that

life's quantity and quality. "

Excerpted from " Love, Medicine and Miracles, " by Bernie S. Siegel, M.D.

 

 

The allopathic and holistic definitions of health differ greatly in

regard to the diagnosis and treatment of illness. People who use

conventional medicine usually do not seek treatment until they

become ill; there is little emphasis on preventive treatment.

 

The main causes of illness are considered to be pathogens-bacteria

or viruses-or biochemical imbalances. Scientific tests are often

used in diagnosis. Drugs, surgery, and radiation are among the key

tools for dealing with the problems.

 

Holistic medicine, in contrast, focuses on preventing illness and

maintaining health.

 

It views health as a balance of body systems - mental, emotional,

and spiritual, as well as physical. All aspects of a person are seen

as interrelated - a principle called holism, meaning " state of

wholeness. "

 

Any disharmony is thought to stress the body and perhaps lead to

sickness. To fight disease, alternative medicine uses a wide range

of therapies to bolster the body's own defenses and restore balance.

The best illustration of this approach is the fact that ancient

Chinese doctors were paid only when their patients were healthy, not

if they became ill.

 

Natural medicine, which follows a holistic approach, views illness

and disease as an imbalance of the mind and body that is expressed

on the physical, emotional, and mental levels of a person.

 

Although allopathy does recognize that many physical symptoms have mental

components (for example, emotional stress might promote an ulcer or chronic

headaches), its approach is generally to suppress the

symptoms, both physical and psychological.

 

Natural medicine assesses the symptoms as a sign or reflection of a deeper

instability within

the person, and it tries to restore the physical and mental harmony

that will then alleviate the symptoms.

 

Holistic medicine recognizes that the human body is superbly

equipped to resist disease and heal injuries. But when disease does

take hold, or an injury occurs, the first instinct in holistic

healing is to see what might be done to strengthen those natural

resistance and healing agents so they can act against the disease

more effectively.

 

Results are not expected to occur overnight. But

neither are they expected to occur at the expense of dangerous side

effects.

 

Natural healing is more or less an attitude. For example, when you

have a headache, instead of immediately reaching for aspirin, which

may injure the lining of your stomach or cause even more serious

side effects, you reach for a pillow and try taking a nap. Backache?

Instead of reaching right away for valium, which can cause fatigue,

loss of coordination, and worse, try relaxing those muscles with

local applications of heat. Severe back pain? Instead of going

immediately to potentially addictive pain relievers, consider an

osteopathic manipulation, which will often remove the cause of the

pain. Chronic severe backache? Before going to surgery, consider

first an exercise program, which in many cases can make surgery

unnecessary.

 

Some heart attack patients never reach the hospital alive, not just

because of the condition itself, but because panic may cause further

constriction of the blood vessels, imposing an intolerable

additional burden.

 

Brain research is now turning up evidence that attitudes of defeat or panic not

only constrict the blood vessels,

but create emotional stresses that have a debilitating effect on the

endocrine and immune systems.

 

Conversely, attitudes of confidence and determination activate benevolent and

therapeutic secretions in the brain.

 

One patient I worked with briefly, whom I'll call Sheila, provided a

dramatic example of the importance of the mind in the recovery

process. When I first met her, she was a thirty-four-year-old woman

facing a mastectomy for life-threatening breast cancer. She was

reluctant to have the operation, feeling that male doctors are too

casual in suggesting that women have their breasts removed. Based on

what I knew of her case, I urged her to have the surgery, and spoke

to her about the importance of having high expectations going into

the operating room-of seeing the surgery as a chance to free her

body from an offender, rather than the beginning of a downward

spiral toward death. We talked for a while about the studies that

have given a scientific basis to the anecdotal stories of the mind's

power in fighting illness, and she thanked me and left.

 

She decided to go ahead with the surgery, but a week or so later her

physician called me to say the operation had been canceled. The

tumor, which the doctor had described to me earlier as " a hand

grenade, " had disappeared entirely. Sheila was taking no medication

at the time; the only explanation is that her own cancer-fighting

capability had risen to the occasion, with the full array of immune

cells that produce the body's own chemotherapy and infuse it into

the cancer cells.

 

While not every story is as remarkable as Sheila's, most of the

patients I studied made a conscious decision, when their spiraling

panic and illness reached a point of desperation, to reject all

notions of inevitability. They became determined not to rely

exclusively on treatment provided by others, but to take an active-

part in the quest for recovery. They accepted the physician's

diagnosis and the unfavorable odds that came along with it, but

refused to be deterred by the accompanying prediction of doom.

 

All of them were, in their own way, living out an ancient idea that

is coming back into favor through current medical research-the idea

that the healing system is connected to a belief system, that

attitudes play a vital part in the recovery process. The medical

community has acknowledged the human brain's ability to exercise a

measure of control over the autonomic nervous system, and as a

result is paying renewed attention to the patient's role in

overcoming disease and maintaining good health.

 

Excerpted from " The Power To Heal: Finding The Healer Within " by

Norman Cousins

 

http://holisticonline.com/Alt_Medicine/altmed_differences.htm

_________________

 

JoAnn Guest

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http://www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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