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 one 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 in the way of health-care at any given point in time. Medical doctors are therefore forced to rely on statistics. They have to reduce all the available information down to something that 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. This becomes a matter of trial and error. If one 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 it is 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 do not even consult with each other as much as 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 on only those aspects of the total human being which are amenable to their particular therapeutic orientation.
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 this particular patient at this particular moment. 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 patient1s 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 one could communicate with the communications network used by the patient1s 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 in which order the 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 can be accessed, the patient can direct her own truly holistic healing process.
The method used to do this is often 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 reflexes, Beardall's Clinical Kinesiology biocomputer model, and dynamical systems theory. You will, unfortunately, find nothing published concerning it. I can hope only to hint at its essence here and invite you to inquire further if interested. Franks' entry procedure is used to link the doctor and patient energetically as well as to program the patient's system to display its needs for change 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 error normally due to the gender specific polarization, hemispheric lateralization, and inter-subsystem disparity inherent in the 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, of course, free to access whatever is on display in the patient1s 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 anything 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 will literally ask for whatever 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 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 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 will not be sufficient to insure its integrity. These cases are promptly referred to the appropriate facilities. Structural adjustments are consistently required, so instruction in Holographic Kinesiology is limited to practitioners licensed to give structural adjustments. This is merely to prevent practitioners from leaving out a part of the treatment as specified by a patient's nervous system, as this would violate the holism of the treatment and possibly produce harm to the patient. This is the medicine of the future envisioned by Thomas Edison.
Perhaps the time has actually come for holistic health-care. It is possible, but only if the wisdom of the body can be heard over the dogma of the experts.
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