What is the difference between alternative medicine and holistic health

The core difference between alternative therapy and overall health is not at all in content, but in attributes - the former is a specific set of intervention methods, while the latter is a set of overall thinking framework for looking at health. Many people think that the two are the same thing, and even tie them together, but in fact they are completely two-dimensional things.

To put it bluntly, the core of alternative therapy is "replacement", which is to use non-mainstream medical methods to directly replace conventional clinical treatment plans. For example, I met an aunt who was newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. After listening to a health care class, she stopped the metformin prescribed by the doctor and boiled some kind of wild vegetable water every day to drink to reduce blood sugar. This kind of operation directly replaced the regular treatment, and the wild vegetable recipe used was a typical alternative therapy. The controversy about alternative therapies has never stopped. Supporters will point to cases that have been verified by evidence. For example, NIH has long included acupuncture as an optional intervention for postoperative pain and vomiting during pregnancy, which indeed has a clear role. ； But the concerns of the opponents are also very real. 90% of the alternative therapies promoted on the market are not supported by large-scale clinical data. If you rush to replace the regular treatment, it can easily lead to serious illness. Last year, a patient with thyroid cancer gave up surgery and took so-called "energy pills", and the disease spread to the lymph nodes within half a year.

Many people associate alternative therapies with overall health. In fact, they really misunderstand overall health.

The core of overall health is "not to separate", not to treat people as a combination of organs, but to look at variables such as physiological state, psychological emotions, living habits, and social relationships together. I used to accompany a friend to the general clinic of a tertiary hospital for long-term migraine treatment. In addition to prescribing pain-relieving sustained-release tablets, the doctor also asked her specifically whether she had recently taken on a new project and stayed up late every day, whether she drank more than three cups of coffee a day, and whether she and her boyfriend who lived together always quarreled. In the end, the plan he gave her included taking medicine and requiring her to take cigarettes every week. Do aerobics in the evening for three days, don't check work news half an hour before going to bed, and take one day a week to go for a walk and don't talk about conflicts - you see, no folk remedies or alternative therapies are used in the whole process. This is the most standard overall health practice. The core is to help you smooth out all the factors that affect your health, rather than replacing formal treatment.

Of course, there are occasional overlaps between the two. For example, some overall health programs will add methods such as mindfulness and moxibustion, but these are supplements, not replacements. For example, patients undergoing chemotherapy use mindfulness to relieve nausea, and use moxibustion to improve cold hands and feet after chemotherapy. Regular chemotherapy is not delayed throughout the process. At this time, these methods are part of the overall health intervention.； But if someone says that you should stop chemotherapy and use moxibustion every day to kill cancer cells, then moxibustion has changed from a supplementary method to an alternative therapy, which has nothing to do with overall health.

Nowadays, many unscrupulous businesses deliberately confuse the two, selling alternative therapy products under the banner of "holistic conditioning" to trick people into stopping regular medicines. This is why many people think that holistic health is a pseudoscience. In fact, they are all suffering from the trap of the concept. It’s easy to tell the difference. It just depends on whether the other party will ask you to stop the regular treatment prescribed by the doctor. Anyone who advises you to stop taking the medicine and replace it with a "secret recipe" must be cautious, no matter how mysterious it is.