Lesson 27. Section 1. Holistic Medicine.
I understand you're interested in holistic medicine. Can you explain what holistic medicine is?

OK, holistic medicine, um, take into consideration the whole of the person. Now what this means in, in most holistic systems is regarding the person as a physical entity, a mental or emotional person, and also even their spiritual side of them.

Um, it also includes looking at the body as a whole rather than looking at individual parts of the body, and as a way of explaining this, we could look at conventional medicine as producing people who are like cardiologist, who looks at a heart, um, a brain specialist, a person who deals with bones, er, etc.

So what we've tended to do in conventional medicine is break things down to a point where we're actually only looking at one part of the person and we're not actually relating terribly well that part to the rest of the body, whereas holistic medicine insists that if there is a problem, er, with your right foot, that is going to somehow, um, effect your entire body.

Um, your speciality is acupuncture. Is that a part of holistic medicine?

Acupuncture is very much a holistic system. Um, traditionally the Chinese regarded the person very much as a whole entity and acupuncture itself works on an energy system basically and in a very simplified way.

It's saying that, er, you have an energy system within your body and when that energy becomes blocked or tainted in someway, then you will manifest certain symptoms and the things we look at in conventional medicine as things like arthritis or rheumatism are to the Chinese merely an imbalance of the energy.