What does holistic mean?
I have googled and read and read and googled but I just cant seem to grasp what it actually means. Its driving me nuts. Send help
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If you take a holistic approach, you’re looking at something in context instead of just isolating it out.
its an idea that you cant take something apart bit by bit and study each bit to then understand the whole. you have to look at the entire system all at one time or you cant understand it.
This is mostly wrong, you absolutely can learn useful information about most things if you take them apart, but think about a human, if you strip a human down to the individual organs and try to study them, no matter how hard you study, you will never find nations within their organs, nor anything that would lead you to understand nations. Its only when you leave all the parts together in a human, and the human in a group of thousands, that you can begin to study what a nation is and how it functions.
Its often used in alternate “medicine” to explain why some pseudoscience works, and to take a jab at allopathic (or western) medicine
Describes something made out of holons. And what that means is, the whole thing is a system, and the elements are also systems in themselves, with system defined as something whose behavior can be thought of as cycling (to get more technical, anything the behavior of which can be graphed as a sine wave). A body is a system and a holon in the total ecology of the world. Cells are holons in the body.
This can be drawn as something looking like a family tree.
Holistic as an adjective meaning complete, or organic or something, is a misuse. Especially when spelled wholistic.
Here’s a more complete description of holon from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holon_(philosophy)
It’s mean the ‘whole’
e.g. if you have a headache, a holistic approach is to check all other aspects of your life/body that may be causing the headache, not just the headache itself.
A non-holistic approach would be to not ask any questions and just give you medicine for the headache
Let’s say you’ve got someone who’s bad at studying. A simple approach might be to think that they might have a learning disorder or struggle with a specific subject.
A holistic approach is to take a look at the bigger picture to see what might be affecting the study. Where are they studying? Is it in a quiet place away from distractions? When are they studying? Are they able to study at a point of the day when they’re fresh and able to concentrate or are they studying at midnight after an 8 hour shift of work? Are they in a good place mentally to study or is their home life stressful always difficult?
A holistic approach is one where you consider the surrounding factors of something to see if there’s anything that’s indirectly causing issues
*Context: health and social care.*
**ELI5:** It means understanding that when a person is healthy or ill, it is not just the idea that physically they do/do not have a disease or illness. It is the idea that health and wellbeing for a person means more than simply being physically well, but also how they feel in their mind/heart/soul, how they interact with the world around them, and how the world interacts with them. So when we care for someone we don’t just look after the body and “fix the problem” like a mechanic fixes a broken piece of machinery, but we consider all the other factors around them.
*“The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”* -Sir William Osler.
**Non-ELI5:** Holistic care is embedded into the concept of person-centred care, and is the term used to indicate a comprehensive approach to patient care – so “looking at the whole” of the individual. Holistic care means considering the many aspects that make a person and their well-being – physiological, psychological, social, developmental, cultural and spiritual well-being. This approach analyses illness and provides healthcare that acknowledges, and responds to, all factors relevant to the health or illness of an individual.
A straightforward and common example of this is use of the biopsychosocial model, which although attributed to Engel (1977) has been used across many cultures across history. The biopsychosocial model puts forward that illness and health are the result of an interaction between three factors: the biological state of an individual, their psychological state, and social environment and connections they have. Other holistic models of care expand to include concepts of: intellectual health, spiritual health, emotional health, environmental health, financial circumstances, purpose and possibilities, ecological/planetary health.
**Further reading:**
Mills IJ (2017) A person-centred approach to holistic assessment. Primary Dental Journal. 6, 3, 18 – 22
Wade DT & Halligan PW (2017) The biopsychosocial model of illness: a model whose time has come. Clinical Rehabilitation. Doi: 10.1177/0269215517709890
It literally is in the word: “hol-” is a different form of the English word “whole”. It is an approach that looks “at the whole” rather than at specific aspects.
For example, in medicine it is understood as first trying to find out everything about the patient, like their wellbeing, other conditions, etc. rather than just treating the symptoms.
If that still sounds a bit blurry, then because it is – it is pretty much not defined what this means in detail, except that it somehow refers to “the grand whole”. It is up to everybody to fill the gaps.
Using vague terms like “holistic” is usually a red flag, as they are often an indication for somebody trying to BS you. Sure, you can get a medical treatment from a professional MD, but you can also pay more for a “holistic” treatment with aroma therapy and homoeopathic sugar pills. If that didn’t help you obviously need more of the same. Cash or credit card?
As a nurse, to me a holistic approach means to not only treat the somatic (physical) issues that a patient has, but to also consider the patient’s social, spiritual, relational and other needs. In short, to consider a patient as a human and not as something that needs to be cured.
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