Wellness Wonders: Exploring Holistic Approaches to Health
The word holistic has been doing heavy lifting for about forty years, and it now covers everything from a genuinely useful idea to a shelf of tinctures at a markup. I wanted to know which parts of it I was justified in taking seriously, so I spent a month asking.
What the word was supposed to mean
The original claim is modest and, as far as I can tell, correct: a symptom is easier to understand when you know the rest of the person. Sleep, work, grief, money and what somebody eats all turn up in the consulting room whether or not anyone writes them down.
Dr. Imani Okafor, who has practiced family medicine for twenty-two years and has no patience for any of this, agreed with it immediately.
“Everyone in primary care is holistic. We just call it taking a history. The problem is not the idea, it is what gets sold under the name.”
Where it earns its keep
Three areas came up in every conversation I had, including the skeptical ones.
Sleep, treated as a medical fact rather than a character flaw
Every practitioner I spoke to asked about sleep before anything else, and all of them treated poor sleep as a cause rather than a symptom. This is the least controversial idea in the whole field and the one most often skipped.
Movement that is not exercise
Walking, gardening, carrying things up a hill. The evidence here is not mysterious and it does not require a subscription.
The thing that is actually being managed
Twice I was told, gently, that what I described as a health problem was a scheduling problem. Both times they were right. No supplement addresses a calendar.
Where I would keep my hand on my wallet
- Anything that requires a proprietary test you cannot get anywhere else.
- Any protocol that explains a failure to improve as the treatment “working.”
- Anything sold in a bundle of more than four products.
- Any practitioner who asks you to stop something a physician prescribed.
That last one is not a matter of taste. Two of the three practitioners I spoke to volunteered it before I asked, which raised my opinion of them considerably.
Where I landed
I now do three things I did not do in January: I walk after dinner, I keep a proper sleep schedule on weekends as well, and I take one supplement that a blood test actually indicated. I stopped two others when the same test said they were unnecessary.
That is a boring conclusion and it cost me about ninety dollars to reach, most of which was the blood test. I consider it money well spent, largely because of what it stopped me buying.
