Chapter 2

The Holistic Model of Health 

What is Holistic Medicine

I am certain that everybody reading this book will have come across the term “Holistic Medicine” at some point in time. There is considerable confusion about the meaning of “holistic.”  If you have ever entered into a discussion about Holistic Medicine you will see that everybody has their own opinion.  This is not surprising, since there are no accepted standard definitions for “Holistic Medicine.”  Most people use the term as a synonym for alternative therapies, basically meaning that they are turning away from any conventional medical options and using alternative treatment exclusively. This is not exactly correct.

Holistic Medicine can be thought of as an approach to how treatment should be applied as opposed to any specific treatment modality itself.  Let's consider a working definition that I put together a little while ago:

“Holistic Medicine is a system of health care that combines many modalities and models of healthcare such as naturopathy, nutrition, homeopathy, herbal medicine, energy medicine, psychoemotional modalities of healing as well as spiritual “soul healing” work such as Hellinger’s Family Constellations. The goal of these combined therapies is to help the patient or clients achieve optimal physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual health.”

Holistic Medicine needs to look at the whole person and how they interact with their environment and the people around them. It needs diagnostic and therapeutic tools to examine and balance the physical, nutritional, environmental, psychological, emotional, social and spiritual levels of health. It therefore encompasses all modalities of diagnosis and treatment as stated above, including allopathic medicine using drugs and surgery if there are no other safer alternatives.

The ultimate goal of Holistic Medicine is to use all diagnostic and treatment modalities available to optimize the health of the person on all levels of well-being, without doing harm to the person. It is the optimization of all resources to bring about a cure in the person, no matter what school or modality they belong to.

There are a number of diagrams that have tried to explain the multimodal approach of Holistic Medicine – perhaps one of the oldest that was developed in the 1980’s by Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt,[1] one of the leading proponents of holistic medicine that has provided many tools for practitioners in this field.

The physical body is at the lowest level and it is the foundation upon which everything else rests. This is the level that most interests medical doctors as well as single-healing modality natural medicine practitioners such as herbal medicine, nutritionists and chiropractors. On the second level is the electromagnetic body – it is the summation of all electric and magnetic events caused by the neuronal activity of the nervous system. This level is generally not examined by medical practitioners as it requires different tools to access this electromagnetic body. Acupuncturists tap into the meridians and chakras that are part of this second level. The third-level body is called the "mental body" and consists of our conscious and subconscious thoughts, attitudes and beliefs. This is where the average psychotherapist will work, but there are also other natural medicine healing modalities such as homeopathy, applied psychoneuro-biology and meditation that can access this level.

On the fourth level, the “Intuitive Body” is the level beyond our level of consciousness – the level of the unconscious, the meditative state and trance state. This is where hypnotherapy, regression therapy and Hellinger’s Family Constellation therapy can access this level.

The fifth level, the “Soul” is perhaps the most profound and the one that is least accessed by therapists of all kinds – it is the level where we at one with a Higher Consciousness, a Higher Power, God. Prayer and the Spiritual aspects of religion can access this level. 

It is generally believed that the first three levels belong to the personal realm, meaning the individual detached from others. The fourth and fifth levels belong to the transpersonal realm, meaning that these are levels that relate to our relationships with others. The lower levels generally supply energy to the higher levels, but the higher levels has an organizing influence on the lower levels.

The premise of Holistic Medicine is to attempt to treat the whole patient on all levels, as opposed to the symptoms. Often a complaint such as migraines may have a myriad of different causes in each patient – so there is no standard therapy for migraines as the causes would be different in each person with migraine. This is why it is important to take into account all the causative factors for each person, and ultimately you will be treating the patient and not the disease per se.

This takes us back to Hippocrates about 2,500 years ago who said:

It appears that this wise statement made by Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine has been forgotten by modern medicine! Instead of looking at the person and trying to understand WHY they have the bunch of symptoms that make up their diagnosis, we consume ourselves with LABELLING the disease and suppressing its symptoms, when we should clearly be looking for its root causes.

We can extrapolate from this that Holistic Medicine is based on a “health-care system” and not a “disease-care system” – it encompasses Preventative Medicine by attempting to catch developing health issues early on, instead of waiting until they reach pathological parameters. Optimizing health should be the ultimate goal of all Holistic Medicine practitioners.

Often Holistic Medicine is not interested in labelling the disease itself as this does not often give information regarding the causes of the symptoms and signs suffered by the person. Holistic Medicine should first identify the causes of the symptoms, which are the body’s way of “talking” to the practitioner, without necessarily being overly concerned with the “diagnosis.”

The 5-levels of healing as postulated by Dr. Klinghardt[2]

This can be clearly illustrated when a person goes to their medical doctor with bowel distension and pain after eating, as well as bouts of intermittent diarrhoea and constipation. The doctor diagnoses Irritable Bowel Syndrome or IBS and usually gives antispasmodic medication to alleviate the symptoms.

A Holistic Medicine practitioner, however, would begin to investigate the causes of these symptoms such as:

1. Lack of hydrochloric acid production in the stomach and deficiency in pancreatic enzymes, leading to poor digestion of food with resulting fermentation and bloating.
2. Food intolerances to wheat, lactose, caffeine and eggs, causing the production of inflammatory chemicals such as cytokinines and COX-2’s.
3. Dehydration - the person only drinks 2-3 glasses of water daily, so is severely dehydrated and his digestive processes suffer as a result.
4. Eating a lot of junk food which is nutritionally deficient, resulting in a downward spiral of nutritional deficiencies.
5. The patient is constantly stressed at home due to marital discord, poor communication with his wife and an autistic child.

Once all these causes are rectified, then the IBS disappears forever – the IBS was the result of these causative factors provoking the symptoms and discomfort, and not that the person was lacking in anti-spasmodic medication, or any other medication.

Based on the abovementioned example, it is clear to see that there are no limits to the range of diseases and disorders that can be treated in a holistic way – simply find all the potential causative factors, remove them, then help the body to repair, rebuild and rebalance – but this needs to be done on all levels – physical body, energetic body, etheric body, mind, emotions, and spirit. This is why when an individual seeks holistic treatment for a particular illness or condition, other health problems automatically improve without direct intervention, as the same causative factors could also be responsible for a myriad of other symptoms.

Holistic Health teaches the person to reach and maintain higher levels of wellness, optimizing health as well as preventing illness. People generally enjoy the vitality and well-being that results from their positive lifestyle changes, and this provides the motivation to continue this process throughout their lives.

In Holistic Medicine the healthcare professional and the patient work as partners – this is really the only way of succeeding as healing is not really related to the practitioner’s skill but the willingness of the patient to work with the practitioner and implement their bespoke healing programme. Rather than just eliminating or masking symptoms, the symptom is used as a guide to look below the surface for the root cause. Whenever possible, treatments are selected that support the body's natural healing system.

The Medical Model of Disease

Recently I have been discussing issues of Holistic Medicine on national TV in Cyprus, where I work and live, in the presence of medical doctors. This has opened up some interesting observations into how allopathic or medical doctors perceive and tackle diseases in their patients.  Generally, with few exceptions, allopathic doctors perceive the body as a physical and chemical entity, much like a mechanic would view a machine. Using this “mechanistic” approach, their concern is to examine these structures using a variety of technologies such as X-rays, MRI’s, CT scans,  gastroscopes, colonoscopes, biochemical lab tests and the like.

These technologies and testing techniques are all measuring the physical and chemical structure of different body parts – the “physical body” which is on the first level of the five levels of healing. They will examine the body organs (their size, shape and whether there are any structural abnormalities) – to the various tissues, down to the cellular level, to determine pathology (disease) of their structure (number of erythrocytes, white blood cells, platelets, histopathological structure of different cells etc) and the biochemical constituents of the blood, plasma and other body fluids.  

Allopathic doctors are extremely well trained in looking at the physical and chemical composition of the body, and they spend many years in medical school doing just this. However, this “mechanistic” perception of the body has many limitations as this only allows us to view one perspective of the human body, when in fact there are many different levels that are important in diagnosing and fully understanding the aetiology of disease.

When observing the allopathic profession examining a patient based on this mechanistic approach, it becomes obvious why they sometimes behave in rather irrational ways. Generally, the “Medical Model of Disease” or “Biomedical Model” is based on collating the symptoms, placing them into a diagnostic category with a specific label, and then using some form of drug, surgery or radiation to eliminate the symptoms.  The assumption is made that all patients are homogenous. The Biomedical model is a “wait for illness” approach.

This is a “symptom suppression” approach to dealing with disease as it rarely identifies the real causes of disease, let alone removing the causes. The fact that a diagnosis has been placed on a diseased organ does not justify the rationale that the diseased organ is the CAUSE of the diagnosis. Tonsillitis, for example, is not the cause of inflamed tonsils; Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is not the cause of an irritable bowel, and so forth. The diagnostic labels themselves may be important for the medical doctors themselves, but they do little to help understand the true causes of disease.

The label given to the symptoms of an illness is not the illness itself – it may surprise you to hear that a cancerous tumour is not the disease per se, it is merely a symptom – the disease itself are all the aetiological factors that caused the body to produce the tumour in the first place – there is more on viewing cancer holistically in chapter 11.

If one puts oneself in the position of a medical doctor with this perception, then it is easy to understand why they behave as they do. For example, if there is a part of the gut that is ulcerated and the symptoms cannot be eliminated using medicinal drugs, then the next “logical” step is to remove the organ itself. This may sound rather surprising to the objective onlooker, but personally I have heard from many patients who have been victims of this narrow-minded approach.

Let’s Whip Out the Gut!

Late last year I was at the local general hospital seeing a young woman in her 20’s who had ulcerative colitis. She was admitted to the hospital as she had slight haemorrhage with diarrhoea, probably related to something that was irritating the gut. During her month’s stay in the hospital she had been taking IV cortisone with strong antibiotics (which will destroy all the protective bacteria in the gut and aggravate the inflammation), she had even had chemotherapy (what they give to cancer patients) – God knows what the logic is here – as well as a visit from the psychiatrist, who readily prescribed anti-depressants as he felt that her gut problems were related to her depression (who would not be depressed in these circumstances)? 

Recently, her parents were invited to a round-table discussion by the head doctor who, with a solemn expression suggested that the gut should be removed immediately to stop the bleeding and irritation, as nothing else seems to be working!

The doctor added, in a final, desperate attempt, that they may instead decide to give Cyclosporine, a powerful immune-suppressing drug that is given to organ transplant patients to prevent rejection – this literally puts the immune system to sleep. Apart from the chances of catching a nasty bug in hospital which would be near impossible to combat without an immune system - the other side effects of this powerful drug are gum hyperplasia, convulsions, peptic ulcers, pancreatitis, fever, vomiting, diarrhoea, confusion, breathing difficulties, numbness and tingling, pruritis, high blood pressure, potassium retention and possibly hyperkalemia, as well as kidney and liver dysfunction.[3]

I very recently saw another unfortunate tragedy – this time with a 12-year old Swedish girl diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease who came to me about one month after the surgeons had removed her complete colon or large intestine and she had a colostomy bag on the side of her abdomen. If you had seen the psychological, emotional and spiritual devastation in this young teenage girl after the surgery it was a sight never to forget.

Yes, I know you are stunned, just as I was – it sounds unbelievable for a relatively simple case that is easy to bring under control simply by altering the diet (by identifying and removing food intolerances and using some healing herbs and homeopathics). There is a case, Mrs. A, in Chapter 12 that was healed of exactly this condition after suffering for 7 years with many symptoms. However, nutrition does not seem to be an issue that is of much concern to gastroenterologists, even though food is the primary material that travels through the entire gut many times per day.  The first patient in the hospital was told after querying the food she was eating, that it was a “controlled diet” that had been carefully planned by the hospital dietician – white bread, margarine, marmalade, hamburgers with spices, white macaroni and toxic chicken, as well as various dairy products and sweet foods – obviously the hospital dietician needs to go back to school if she considers this to be a healthy diet!

I made some quick suggestions to her so that she could change her diet immediately – to eat mostly steamed vegetables, vegetable juices and fruit, while taking Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids (which help the body produce natural anti-inflammatory prostaglandins), as well as a mixture of herbs known for their anti-inflammatory effects such as curcumin (tumeric) and boswelia, as well as aloe vera juice. Three days after implementing this simple regime she began feeling a lot better, and there is a lot more that can be done such as identifying and removing her food intolerances, as well as optimizing her diet based on her metabolic type – which will need to wait until she is discharged from the controlled hospital environment and her dietician.

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