What is the difference between alternative medicine and holistic health

The two are not concepts of the same dimension at all - alternative therapies are a bunch of specific, optional health interventions, while overall health is a set of underlying logic for viewing health and dealing with health problems.

I met a 32-year-old girl who works in Internet operations two years ago. She has been suffering from migraines for almost three years. She has had brain CT and Doppler done, but no organic problems were found. At first, she heard a friend recommend her to seek acupuncture from a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, buy imported aromatherapy oil for head massage, and buy various herbal supplements from overseas. These methods are used to replace conventional pain relief solutions, which are typical alternative therapies. She had been on a detour for half a year, and she still suffered from headaches every week. Later, she came here for health management. We did not recommend any intervention methods to her first, but lived a complete life with her for two weeks: we found that she slept at 2 a.m. for a long time, and she was frozen in front of the computer for eight or nine hours when working on projects. Connecting these scattered points, from adjusting her work and rest, correcting her shoulder and neck posture, to teaching her to use non-violent communication to get along with her family, and even helping to adjust the height of the monitor at her workstation, this whole set of ideas that does not focus on the single symptom of "headache" and adjusts the person as a whole is the core of overall health.

Nowadays, many people confuse the two, and even think that using alternative therapies is to practice overall health. In fact, there are many misunderstandings in this. I once encountered a patient who was diagnosed with a 3mm ground glass pulmonary nodule. He was tricked into doing some kind of "energy healing", saying that he didn't need to follow up or take medicine, and that the nodules could be eliminated by "frequency modulation". The so-called healer also used the banner of "overall health" and said that Western medicine only focuses on the nodules and not the whole person. As a result, the patient did not go for a follow-up examination in a year. When he was checked again, he had early-stage lung cancer. Although the prognosis was good, he suffered the sin of surgery. This actually deifies alternative therapies and has nothing to do with the original intention of overall health.

There are ongoing debates about the boundary between the two in academia and industry. Friends who do research on traditional medicine believe that many alternative therapies are born from the traditional holistic view of health. For example, the syndrome differentiation and treatment of traditional Chinese medicine originally treats people as a whole. , there is no need to forcefully separate the two; but friends in public health insist that the boundary must be drawn clearly, because they are afraid that many informal businesses sell exorbitantly expensive alternative therapy products under the banner of "holistic health" and collect IQ taxes, and delaying the disease is a big deal. In fact, if you have really done front-line health management, you will know that the two can be combined very well. For example, for the girl who had migraines before, we later included acupuncture from a regular institution as part of the adjustment plan to quickly relieve her shoulder and neck tension. In conjunction with other adjustments, her headache frequency dropped from three or four times a week to only once every two months in about half a year.

To give a simple analogy, if you think of taking care of your health as taking care of your own small balcony garden, overall health tells you that you can't just water the nutrient solution when the flowers turn yellow. You have to check whether the soil is hardened, the sun is less exposed, or insects are attracted, including whether you have forgotten to water it recently. The alternative treatment is that bottle of nutrient solution and that natural insecticide, which are just optional tools. There is no right or wrong in the tool itself, it just depends on whether you regard it as a small piece of the puzzle in the entire maintenance plan, or whether you think it can solve all problems.