Holistic Medicine- Treating the Whole Mind, Body and Spirit

Holistic medicine is often defined as a medical discipline that studies the whole person, - not just the physical body, but also the mind, body and spirit.

The term “Holistic Medicine” may also be referred to as “alternative medicine”, or medical practices that fall outside western traditional practices.

The Holistic practitioner believes that disease arises when your entire being, i.e., body, mind and spirit is out of balance.  An example of this would be, that if you’re mind is “out of sorts”, it’s likely to show up somewhere in your body as a physical ailment. 

The American Medical Association has a hard time with this simple concept, although many individuals would not dispute the fact that when someone who’s upset about a situation, or has had a rough day, often winds up with a headache. There’s nothing really “alternative” about that concept except that modern medicine can’t prove it scientifically.

It’s better stated by French quantum physicist Alain Aspect:

• "The main difficulty in popularizing quantum physics is that we do not really know how to make images of it in our world. In this sense it is really counter-intuitive.”

Einstein’s theory of relativity hasn’t ever been "proven", but like all brilliant scientific theories it’s generally accepted to be true. The Holistic theory of medicine, while equally scientific is still highly controversial. I will present an argument for the scientific explanation of Holistic Medicine, but it’s important to first fully understand the difference between traditional and non-traditional medical modalities.

The Traditional practitioner, or medical doctor treats the disease rather than the underlying cause of the disease. If you have a severe backache, you’re given pain-killers or you have surgery. If you have nephrotic syndrome you’re given anti-inflammatory drugs to reduce the symptoms of the disease. If you have cancer, you undergo treatments to destroy the cancer cells, again to reduce the symptoms, (which include spreading cancer cells), not the underlying cause. Your doctor may also suggest surgery to cut away the cancerous body parts. Usually, the diagnosis is achieved by subjecting the patient to one or more tests that may reveal the physical source of the pain, but again, not necessarily the cause of the disease.

The Holistic practitioner begins by taking into account the person’s lifestyle, eating habits, environment, emotional make-up, social and spiritual values and activities. This occurs before a diagnosis or treatment is given for any physical ailment. Both traditional and alternative treatments are considered although drugs and surgery are not recommended unless safer alternatives do not exist or have been ineffectual. There are numerous Alternative treatments some of which may include a radical change in diet, acupuncture and herbal therapy to mention only a few.

Depending on the type of alternative modality, a practitioner may also use non-traditional methods to diagnose the state of the patient’s “subtle energy field”.

The definition of “energy fields” is complex and multi-cultural; however, it is the unifying link, where science and alternative medicine come together. If one seeks a deeper explanation of Holistic Medicine the answer is to be found within the scientific studies of quantum physicists Alain Aspect (quoted previously), and David Bohm.

In 1982 Aspect discovered that electrons and other subatomic particles can communicate with each other instantaneously, even if they billions of miles apart. This was a radical departure from Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  What’s more, Aspect’s team observed that these individual electrons and subatomic particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental source or being.

London physicist David Bohm further explained Aspect’s findings by suggesting that in spite of the commonly held belief that the universe is composed of solid matter, it’s actually just a phantasm - a mental representation of a real object, or essentially a Hologram. This is pretty heavy stuff. After all, if the universe is a mental representation of a real object where (and who) is the real object? We may consider that it is the fundamental source/being.

Call it the collective intelligence, the Universe, or God, or as quantum physicists suggest, your own individual mind. Scientifically; however, this theory forms the basis for not only Holistic medicine, but also the entire spectrum of unexplained phenomena including telepathy, psychokinesis, out of body experiences, intuition and all of the vibrational healing modalities which work with the body's "etheric" energy including distant healing, Reiki, and many more.

If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected. The universal intelligence is "one".

Here’s where Holistic Medicine comes into play, because Holistic Medicine studies the whole person and his or her relationship to the universe - rather than just the “diseased” parts of their anatomy. Holistic Medicine operates on the premise that our bodies are not machines with parts that break down only to be propped up by drugs or replaced through surgery.

A hologram as we know it is a 3-dimensional picture that appears to have depth. We can create holograms with images and lasers. Perhaps you’ve seen the 3-dimensional image of a hologram at a museum or at Disney World or on your credit card. Did you know that you can even have a hologram of your head made to order? What a nice little trophy for posterity. But all that aside, if we take a holographic image of your head and cut it in two, then illuminated it with a laser, each half will contain all the same information as the entire hologram of your head. You won’t see a hologram of half a head - you’ll see a smaller image of the whole head. Cut it in half again, and you’ll see four complete images of the whole head. The “whole in every part” is the nature of all holograms, and if you believe in the Bohm/Aspect theories of quantum physics, life itself.

Modern medicine, (or should I say Western medicine), in contrast, operates under the premise that in order to fully understand the human body, or atoms for that matter, one must dissect it and study it’s parts. If everything in the universe is in essence a hologram, the “answer” cannot be found.

Many individuals accept a Holistic approach to medicine. Many disciplines including herbal remedies, acupuncture, aromatherapy, magnetic therapy, ayurveda, homeopathy, meditation and reflexology fall into this category and many are over 3000 years old.

Although the model of traditional western medicine is “young” compared to the eastern medical paradigm, many of us in the west are stuck in our beliefs regarding the effectiveness and intelligence of modern western medicine. The world’s more esoteric, albeit effective methods of Holistic healing are often looked upon with trepidation and distrust. We’re prone to quick fixes in the west and western medicine fills the bill for us effectively, but not always wholly. I believe that this will change.

As science and the “paranormal” merge – and they will with each new discovery within the field of quantum mechanics, we will embrace even more than the ancient healing modalities, we will accept the true nature of the universe and in essence, our true holistic selves.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology / MIT Museum - Hologram Collection

Alain Aspect : Shedding new light on light and atoms

British Physicist David Bohm- The Holographic Model of the Brain

Michael Talbot - The holographic universe