The Difference Between Alternative Medicine and Holistic Health

Alternative therapy is a type of treatment tool that is opposed to mainstream evidence-based medicine and is used to partially or completely replace conventional medical intervention. The core attribute is "the choice of treatment plan."」； Holistic health is an underlying framework for looking at health. The core is to view people as complete individuals whose physiology, psychology, social relationships, and mental states interact with each other, rather than as a collection of separated organs or symptoms. The essence is the "logic of health cognition." The two are completely different from the underlying attributes.

Last week at a natural medicine industry salon, I met an aunt who had just undergone early-stage breast cancer surgery. The doctor ordered her to take endocrine drugs for five years to reduce the risk of recurrence. As a result, she stopped taking the drugs after taking a health class. She drank fruit and vegetable enzymes and did back moxibustion at home every day. She said that she was following the "overall health" route, which was much better than taking Western medicine with side effects. To be honest, this is the most typical conceptual confusion - the enzymes and moxibustion she chose belong to the category of alternative therapies and have nothing to do with overall health.

According to the clear definition of the Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) under the National Institutes of Health, the core of alternative therapy is "replacement": instead of using conventional treatments that have been proven effective by mainstream clinical trials, instead using intervention methods such as traditional medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, and energy therapy. Now the industry will actually separate it more rigorously from "complementary therapies": supplements are used together with conventional treatments, such as using acupuncture to relieve vomiting after chemotherapy, which is supported by evidence. ； Substitution is to directly replace conventional treatment. For example, like the previous aunt who stopped taking endocrine moxibustion, the risk is completely uncontrollable. Practitioners from different positions have very different evaluations of it: Supporters will use examples of functional diseases such as chronic pain and irritable bowel syndrome for which conventional medical treatments have no effective solutions to prove that alternative methods such as acupuncture, mindfulness, and herbal medicine can indeed improve symptoms. ； The opposition will point out thousands of clinical cases every year where the condition worsens due to abandoning conventional treatment and using alternative therapies, emphasizing that most alternative therapies lack evidence support from large-scale randomized double-blind experiments, and are essentially gambling with the patient's health.

When it comes to holistic health, it’s really not a specific treatment or even exclusive of any treatment. I previously followed up a patient who had suffered from essential hypertension for 3 years. He took three antihypertensive drugs, but his blood pressure still fluctuated up and down. After doing an overall health assessment, I found that after he retired, he had been taking care of his wife with Alzheimer's disease at home. He slept less than 4 hours a day. His child worked abroad and could not come home once every six months. Long-term anxiety was the core cause of blood pressure fluctuations. Later, we did not adjust his medication plan. We just contacted the mutual aid group for the care of the elderly with dementia in the community and asked him to attend mindfulness-based stress reduction classes two afternoons a week. We also helped him find a live-in nanny to help him three days a week. After two months, his blood pressure stabilized in the normal range, and he even took one less medication under the doctor's advice. You see, in this process we use both mainstream antihypertensive drugs and mindfulness, which is a complementary therapy. The core is to adjust the plan around his entire life. This is the practical application of overall health.

Interestingly, the intersection of the two has been controversial within the industry. Many practitioners of the natural medicine school will feel that alternative therapy itself is the implementation of the concept of overall health. After all, conventional medical treatment is used to "treat the head first", while alternative therapy pays more attention to the patient's overall condition. ； However, experts in the mainstream public health field will refute: Many organizations that advocate alternative therapies deify a single intervention method, such as asking all patients with chronic diseases to drink the same "natural enzyme" and not allowing them to undergo routine physical examinations. This kind of thinking is essentially the same as the thinking of "prescribing antibiotics regardless of the disease" and completely goes against the core of overall health.

Ordinary consumers can actually easily distinguish between the two: if someone tells you, "My overall health plan can completely replace the antihypertensive/antihyperglycemic drugs you are currently taking, without having to go to the hospital for review," there is no doubt that he is selling alternative therapies and has stolen the concept of overall health.； Practitioners who truly adhere to the concept of holistic health will definitely ask you "Are you taking your medicines as prescribed by your doctor now?" Have you had any relevant review recently? ”, will always first affirm the basic role of conventional treatment, and then provide you with adjustment plans to supplement physical, mental, and social relationships.

I have been doing health management for so many years, and my biggest feeling is that there is never the best treatment, only the plan that is most suitable for a specific person. If you regard a certain tool as the whole truth, whether it is targeted medicine or moxibustion, it actually goes against the original intention of overall health - after all, the tool is dead, and the person holding the tool is the core.