The Open Boat

Holistic Health

"I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found."

John Muir

For most of the last two thousand years, the practice of medicine has been based on concepts of holistic health. The practice of holistic health was only recently replaced when the pharmaceutical industry began to take control of medicine.

Holistic health means more than 'alternative medicine' which is sometimes used to describe alternative therapies applied to mechanistically-viewed symptoms.

Holistic health means:

1) Viewing your body's total health as a whole.
2) Defining illness as inability to detoxify fast enough the many demands on your immune system.
3) Viewing all symptoms of illness as your body's unique response to this one problem.

A general correct idea of health empowers us to be able to think for ourselves about our health and begin to make informed decisions for our own well-being.

"...being without general ideas, they could only focus on petty specific grievances."

George Orwell
1984

We think we are so well educated in our society but we are completely without information about our own health. What comes naturally to us as children in protecting our health, our parents are taught to discredit, until as adults we ourselves no longer credit how we feel or remember what feels good and healthy.

We all lack a foundation of information about basic health. Goddess Hygeia, pictured at right, originally meant health, as in vitality, as in strength and life-force. Hygeia - as well as our own concept of HEALTH - was redefined to be 'hygiene', which still has a valid meaning in that we are healthy with pure air and clean surroundings; but the meaning of that word was further refined to be interpreted as 'killing germs'. Now the word no longer serves us. When you use poisons, inside or outside your body, to accomplish the killing of germs, rather than creating an internal and external environment where germs do not thrive, you have just defeated your purpose. By simply killing germs, you maintain the environment where germs thrive and kill off a little bit of your own vitality at the same time. The Goddess Hygeia and Chlorox (a chemical warfare agent from WWI) have nothing in common.

The environmentally contaminated circumstances present today are comparable to 100 years ago, before the germ theory of disease became well understood, when people rubbed manure into wounds or physicians did contaminated pelvic exams after an autopsy.

Dr. William J. Rea
Fellow, American Academy of Environmental Medicine [www.ehcd.com]

Environmental Medicine is the practice of holistic medicine in the most complete sense, and rather than being a 'new' discipline, it is really a renaissance in our approach to health.

In the past, the symptoms produced by an illness were viewed as the natural response of the body to a compromised state; symptoms were seen as an attempt by the body to ward off a noxious stimulus and restore balance.

In the beginning of the 19th Century, the definition of disease was changed. The new view of disease saw symptoms as the actual malady. This changed the role of physicians in caring for patients. Now the disease should be treated by simply suppressing symptoms.

The new view implied that the response of the body to an illness was inappropriate and that it was the responsibility of the physician to override this response. This view gives no credit to living systems for any intelligence and sees no connection outside or inside an organism. Now living systems came to be viewed as similar to 'machines' that simply needed a part changed, like a flat tire that has no connection to the other tires on the car.

[Click here] for a comparison of holistic vs. allopathic (mechanistic) views of health.

The same basic understanding of holistic principles was also replaced in our agricultural community. When our forefathers saw pests in their fields, they did not view them as problems, but rather as symptoms of imbalance. Instead of assaulting the pests with poisons, they interrupted pest cycles by rotating crops and enriched the soil so that plants could withstand pests on their own.

The same concepts operate in Environmental Medicine and holistic medicine as in organic farming. In both, the system is viewed as a whole - one considers the body as a whole system, the other considers the farm as a whole system. In both, the holistic approach would treat the underlying cause of the symptom as opposed to the mechanistic approach which simply attempts to make the symptom go away while leaving the problem in place that produced it. While the problem remains, noxious symptoms will continue in one form or another.

Pesticide and pharmaceutical sales thrive in this confusion. Both are ineffective at restoring health to living systems; and their very ineffectiveness translates into higher profits. Rather than let go of the truly mind-boggling profits that their ineffectiveness produces, the industry - and chemical and pharmaceutical are both the same - would now change the genetic structures of flora and fauna.

"Roundup Ready" corn, soybeans and other crops were genetically engineered by Monsanto to survive Monsanto's Roundup, an herbicide that kills any plant it hits, unless the plant has been genetically engineered to withstand the chemicals. The question is, have you been genetically engineered to withstand Roundup? Probably not. Independent scientific studies have shown that Roundup is toxic to mammals, birds, earthworms, and beneficial insects.

[View Roundup Ready Nation]

Holistic disciplines understand that there is an ethical principle operating in living systems. This principle operates as the necessity to stay in balance - you cannot do anything you want - pests, germs, or ill health are symptoms of imbalance, and act as a sort of benevolent alert system. The only real correction is to restore balance.

The message of chemical sensitivity highlights the flaw in thinking only of what is expedient and 'more clever' than balance while ignoring the future. Acting on the motive of expediency while knowingly damaging future prospects is an act of desperation. As Thoreau observed, "It is a quality of wisdom that it does not commit desperate acts."