Internist Nancy Harris, MD, has learned a lot over her 15 years of providing holistic primary care services in remote regions of Tibet. Among the lessons, the power of nutrition to transform lives, and the power of human dignity to transcend adversity.
For the past decade, the Vitamin Angel Alliance has been bringing vitamins and other nutritional supplements to hungry, displaced families facing the ravages of war, natural disaster and merciless poverty.
From battlefield hospitals in Iraq, to flood survivor relief centers in Sri Lanka and New Orleans, holistic physicians are showing that natural medicine can play a key role in front-line emergency medicine. Inspiring portraits of holism in action.
Many of the personality traits and behaviors that help doctors survive the rigors of their training and the stresses of their practices also make it very difficult for doctors to relate to their patients, colleagues and loved ones.
To a surgeon, it may be just another case. But to the patient, an operation—any operation, even a “minor” one—can be a profound and frightening experience, one that requires a deep level of trust. Judith Petry, MD, describes how her own experience under the knife opened her eyes to the need for greater reverence and respect in the operating room.
For much of its history, conventional allopathic medicine has used the language of warfare to describe its methods and practices. Adversarial thinking is deeply ingrained in medical culture. Gladys McGarey, MD, one of the pioneers of the holistic medicine movement, believes it is high time to change that.
No matter how good a doctor is, all of his or her patients will die—someday. Even the doctor, too, is a mere mortal. But medicine has had a very hard time reckoning with this basic fact of life. According to Leslie Blackhall, MD, a geriatric and palliative care specialist, medicine’s denial of death is a major contributor to health care costs.
In an April Fool’s Day parody, David Reilly, MD, a Scottish physician best known for his landmark studies of homeopathy, applies the standards of evidence-based medicine to determine which kind of music is “the most effective.”
The emergence of holistic health care, and particularly Oriental medicine, into the medical mainstream may have befuddled many conventionally trained physicians. It has been equally confusing on the other side of the fence. Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, who often find themselves practicing in collaboration with MDs, voice their experiences and concerns.
Holistic medicine is all about humanity and compassion, but one cannot ignore the economic issues raised by the emergence of holistic approaches into mainstream medicine. Practitioners, patients and policy makers are struggling to figure out how natural medicine fits, and who will ultimately pay for it.
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