The difference between alternative medicine and holistic health is

The essence of alternative therapy is "a single treatment logic that replaces conventional medical solutions with non-mainstream intervention methods", while holistic health is "a systematic cognitive framework that treats people as a complete individual unified by body, mind, society and spirit, and connects all health resources" - the two are not fundamentally a dimensional concept.

I worked as an assistant in a natural medicine clinic for three years, and I saw too many examples of people confusing the two. What impressed me most was a 32-year-old foreign company executive who suffered from chronic migraines. She went to the hospital to check whether there was any organic problem. She was afraid of dependence on painkillers, so she applied for a moxibustion card at a health center and went for an hour of moxibustion when it hurt. She felt better, but she stayed up all night to catch up on plans. She didn’t dare to refuse when the boss gave her extra work. She drank three glasses of ice cream a day, but her headaches still occurred three or four times a week. She also complained that "moxibustion is useless."

You see, this is a typical idea of ​​treating alternative therapies as "replacing conventional medical care": whether it is taking painkillers or doing moxibustion, the essence is "find a way to relieve the pain when it hurts", without caring about the source of the pain. Later, she came to us for health consultation, and after reviewing her diet and mood records for half a month, she discovered that every time she had a headache, she had either just finished a quarrel with her family, or she had worked overtime until 11 o'clock for a week in a row, and her cervical spine was so stiff that she could not move. The plan we gave was nothing special: we continued moxibustion as usual, but instead of moxibustion only when there was pain, we changed it to fixed moxibustion on the shoulder, neck and Baihui twice a week. ； First reduce the iced American style to one cup a day, then replace it with room temperature ； He also gave her a half-joking "job rejection template". Next time she encounters a job that doesn't belong to her, she will try to reject it. ； Take 10 minutes after get off work every day to do neck stretching along with the video. Don’t stay at home to catch up on sleep on weekends, and invite friends to go hiking. Within two months, the frequency of her headaches dropped to once every two months. She was surprised and said, "It turns out it's not that there's something wrong with my head, it's that my whole body is twisted."

This is the misunderstanding that many people have about alternative therapies. They think that acupuncture, massage, aromatherapy, and dietary therapy are upgrades that are "more natural and have no side effects" than Western medicine, and can even replace conventional treatments such as surgery and chemotherapy. To be honest, the mainstream medical community's doubts about alternative therapies are not biased. Our clinic has received a patient with early-stage lung cancer. The doctor originally said that the cure rate of surgery can be more than 80%. He heard from online "health bloggers" that vegetarianism can kill cancer cells, so he was discharged directly. After a year of vegetarianism, he came back for a follow-up examination and found that distant metastasis had already occurred. This kind of tragedy takes the word "replacement" to the extreme. Now regular natural medicine practitioners will repeatedly emphasize to users: alternative therapies can never replace necessary conventional medical treatment. This is the bottom line that cannot be touched.

But conversely, there is no need to kill all non-mainstream therapies at once. When I attended the domestic overall health industry summit last year, an old public health professor said something that was particularly poignant: “Many people now call alternative therapies an IQ tax, but they are actually used in the wrong place. If you regard the syndrome differentiation and treatment of traditional Chinese medicine as a substitute for antibiotics, and ask for Chinese medicine without anti-inflammatory drugs when you catch a cold, you are using traditional Chinese medicine in a narrow way. ； If you use mindfulness as a substitute for sleeping pills, and you just sit there and catch your breath for ten minutes when you can't sleep, then mindfulness is useless. Holistic health never means that you don't need western medicine, nor does it mean that you eat boiled vegetables every day. Its core is to "see the complete person" instead of just focusing on that uncomfortable symptom. ”

I myself have experienced this pitfall when I suffered from lumbar muscle strain. At first, I always went to a massage parlor to massage my waist. After the massage, I felt comfortable for two days. But after sitting for a long time, it hurt again. I even scolded the masseur for his poor skills. It was only later that I realized that I had my legs crossed every day. The office chair was so short that my feet couldn’t touch the ground. My core strength was so weak that I couldn’t even support a plank for 20 seconds. Even if I pressed it every day, I couldn’t stop myself from straining my waist while sitting there. Later, I raised my seat, posted a small note under the monitor to remind myself not to cross my legs, and took time to practice core training twice a week. Now, even if I sit for seven or eight hours straight to write a plan, my waist rarely hurts. I still go for massage occasionally, but it is already a way to relax on the weekends, not an "alternative" to treat back pain.

To put it bluntly, there is no need for these two concepts to be in opposition. There is nothing wrong with alternative medicine per se; what is wrong is the mentality of treating it as a panacea. Overall health is more like a way of living, and it does not exclude any effective method - whether it is antihypertensive drugs prescribed by Western medicine, or acupuncture of traditional Chinese medicine, or even the emotional value of complaining to your best friend for half an hour every week, as long as it can help you, a "complete person", become more relaxed, it is a good thing. After all, there is never a standardized answer to health, right?