What is the difference between alternative medicine and holistic health?

The core difference between the two is not a difference in concepts of the same type at all - alternative therapy is a collective name for a series of non-traditional medical interventions that are opposite to mainstream conventional medical care. They are essentially optional "tools".”； Holistic health is a health cognitive framework that views people as a unified whole of body, mind, society and spirit. It is essentially a "guiding idea" for allocating all health resources. It is not a one-dimensional thing at its core. To use an inappropriate analogy, alternative therapy is like the fascial gun, moxibustion sticks, and aromatherapy essential oils that you keep in your drawer, while overall health is the judgment logic that you know when to use ibuprofen, when to use the fascial gun to relax your shoulders and neck, and when to go to bed early and don’t force yourself to do it. You can’t say that having a fascia gun means you understand health management, right?

Many people tend to confuse the two or even equate them. In fact, most of them are led astray by the chaos in the market. Two years ago, I met a girl who suffered from long-term migraines. She first went to an institution that focused on "holistic natural therapy." Then she stopped taking the painkillers prescribed by the doctor and only drank fruit and vegetable juices and had scalp massages every day. She spent less than 20,000 yuan and the pain became more frequent. Later I found out that part of her migraines was caused by the straightening of the cervical spine that compressed the nerves. Part of it was caused by long-term overtime anxiety. When we made the plan, we first asked her to follow the doctor's instructions from the orthopedics and neurology departments to do traction and take mild analgesics as needed. At the same time, we added the head massage that she had found useful before as a relaxation method. Together with adjustments to her work and rest and emotional counseling once a week, her seizure frequency dropped by 80% in less than three months. You see, in this process, head massage belongs to the category of alternative therapies, but it can only really work if it is put into the overall health concept and adapted to the specific situation of the person. If alternative therapies themselves are regarded as all health management, problems will easily arise.

There are indeed differences in the attitudes of the medical community towards the two. Some conservative Western medicine practitioners feel that all alternative therapies do not have enough large-scale evidence-based evidence, and that overall health is a conceptual IQ tax. Other practitioners of integrative medicine feel that as long as the alternative therapies have been verified for safety and are effective for individual users, they can be included in the overall health plan, and there is no need to stand in opposition to conventional medical care. I have been doing health management for five or six years, and the biggest feeling is that you don’t have to worry about the concept and name. Whether it is conventional treatment or alternative therapy, as long as it is used under the idea of ​​"treating you as a complete person, rather than a separate disease", it is a good health choice. What I fear the most is treating a certain tool as the only truth, but putting the cart before the horse.