Holistic or complete health is an expression that says that nothing should be excluded, removed as unnecessary or superfluous. The more we succeed in reclaiming the discarded parts of ourselves, reviving them through recognition and acceptance, the more complete we become.
Today’s medicine fails to embrace man as an authentic individual and to devote himself to him.
From my personal experience, experience during education and later work in the medical profession, I came to devastating facts: medical personnel of all profiles and categories are overwhelmed by the volume of diseases that occur in people and very often burn out in attempts to achieve something in the minimum time.
On the other side, we have sick beings who, in the desire to be helped in a short time in the greatest possible number, are classified into categories according to diseases, in an attempt to be treated with one tested drug, method, process that gave satisfactory results in the test group.
In this way, we do not go to the source of the problem, to the cause of the disease, but stay at the level of symptoms and their suppression.
A symptom is our body’s signal light that it is out of balance. Problems in our lives: in relationships, with money, children, at work, are also symptoms, warning lights that something is not right, and what is not right is usually much deeper inside us than we are aware of.
Suppressing symptoms with symptomatic therapy (analgesics, antipyretics, antiphlogistics, antibiotics…) is masking the problem. Often, if some lifestyle changes are not implemented along with drug therapy, symptoms appear in another organ, system, or area. This deepens the problem and causes more demanding work to discover “the one behind”.
Holistic, integrative or complementary medicine, by its very origin, says that it does not exclude or reject anything, but rather works on seeing the individual as a whole. This approach requires much more time than conventional medical treatment.
It requires commitment, and most importantly awareness. It requires the joint action of therapists, counselors, medics as well as the person undergoing counseling.
Illness is not a thing, something we have, as it is often presented in speech. It is not something that attacked us, came from somewhere and now owns us. Even more important is not something that happens suddenly. I personally really liked this interpretation given by Dr. Gabor Mate.
He also describes illness as a manifestation of our life up to that moment.