Translated from MSZ 2-1986

“Holistic Medicine”

Health philosophy for hard times

“The public is less and less satisfied with the current system of medical care. It notes with bitterness that the costs of this system have risen excessively, without the health of the people having improved significantly . . .” (F. Capra, Foreword to H. Milz, Holistic Medicine: New paths to health, 1985)

It can’t possibly be the fault of the “current system of medical care” if people are getting sicker instead of healthier. After all, modern medicine does a lot; and if people still go back regularly to the doctor’s office after being successfully treated, then this is solely due to what they have to do with their organs outside the doctor’s office. Mass illness does not exist “despite,” or maybe even “because of,” the existing medical system – as alternative medicine claims – but because the social conditions in which people constantly have to ruin their health are the premise of “our” health care system.

But that’s precisely what those who have devoted themselves to every conceivable form of “alternative medicine,” and who have set out to find “new ways to health” with health manuals like “As healthy as possible! Self-help in sick times” or perhaps an “Ecological Etiquette Book,” do not want to see. With willful ignorance toward the real causes of illness, alternative medicine practitioners blame the (mending) services of modern medicine for the fact that the health of the population is not all that good. After all, these medical services are in huge demand, so – this is the grim conclusion – those who are affected must also be to blame if they are constantly getting sick!

There can therefore be no talk of a “gentler art of healing” (as “der Spiegel” puts it): On the one hand, the demands for “new healthy behaviors” are extremely ungentle; on the other, the “art of healing” is extremely flawed when it acts as an alternative to the established knowledge of modern “conventional medicine.”

The new perspective: the “whole person”

“Holistic medicine is not a new specialty of our conventional medicine, nor is it a fixed canon of techniques. It is primarily based on a changed philosophical concept and a changed perception of reality.” (H. Milz)

What’s so wrong with the “perception of reality” of classical “conventional medicine” that it urgently needs to “expand its field of vision” through the concept of holistic medicine? Or the “isolated preoccupation” with disease which ignores the fact that a patient is a “whole human being,” i.e. more than just his sick stomach or an inflamed appendix that the doctor cures?

This criticism is reminiscent of the old doctor’s joke about the “stomach in room 12,” except that this joke is now being presented in all seriousness as a critical theory about the treatment method of conventional medicine, which is accused of treating “only” the respective sick part of the person and not the “holistic being.” According to “holistic medicine,” being the “object” of a doctor’s intervention is supposed to be a method of treatment completely inappropriate for “human beings.” Here the patient – we learn – is completely “at the mercy of the doctor’s skills” and thus prevented from “consciously participating” in the treatment.

It is, of course, quite stupid to ask why this should bother a “human” whose sick parts have been successfully cured, and whether he would be better served if – instead of being “unconscious” under general anesthesia – he watched his surgeon’s fingers with “critical consciousness.” Because this is not how the supporters of “holistic medicine” want their criticism of “conventional medicine” to be understood – they by no means want to do without its rational achievements, but to “limit” them and enrich them with their new “philosophical concept”:

“Holistic medicine is not a substitute for the possibilities of orthodox medicine; it can serve to reduce its application to an appropriate extent, and it can point out ways – with emphasis on the co-responsibility of every human being for his health – to find the body, mind and soul of comprehensive health.” (H. Milz)

And yet: for all the modesty affected by “holistic medicine,” the “new perspective” it demands can’t do without a few rather stupid arguments against the practice of conventional medicine. After all, it claims to have noticed a fundamental inadequacy in the dominant “conventional medicine” that makes a correction to the hitherto customary “helping and healing” necessary. What this is supposed to be, one learns from Milz in his report on the conditions in “our high-tech hospitals”:

“Since most clinical decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient information, the practice of medicine inevitably retains some characteristics of art.”

Which is why it is “inevitable” that some type of “malpractice” occurs during medical interventions, right?! One thing is clear: For a “holistic physician,” the (alleged) “insufficient information” in “clinical decisions” is not the slightest reason to get rid of this situation as quickly as possible. On the contrary: Because every medical diagnosis has to deal with a “whole human being,” from the point of view of “holistic medicine,” an exact medical diagnosis about this or that illness is not even possible. Nothing is known for certain – this is its medical diagnosis:

“What the patient experiences and what the doctor observes usually forms a confusing variety of symptoms and pathological tissue changes rather than a clearly defined unit . . .” (H. Milz)

However, he does not want to reject a necessary medical intervention. Even a “holistic doctor” considers this to be indispensable in “certain cases” – but not without communicating his fundamental reservations. And this is what they sound like:

“Some may wonder how a doctor manages to perform a surgical procedure. From my own experience I can say that during surgery you often forget that you have a person in front of you. Except for the surgical field, the body is covered for hygienic reasons. You work like a mechanic and try to be as precise and careful as possible.” (H. Milz)

So what? After all, everything is actually ok, as you can see from the report. Because obviously the knowledge that a “whole person” is lying on the operating table changes nothing in the medical findings about his illness and the resulting necessary surgical intervention. According to “holistic medicine,” there is supposed to be something necessarily inhumane about the very benefit of “conventional medicine,” by e.g. operating on diseased organs to restore the bodily prerequisites for acting as a human being and realizing his purposes.

An unhealthy “perspective”!

Hey, what’s going on in there?

“The new question in medicine is: Why does this person have this disease at this time? That is the core question of the holistic view.” (H. Milz)

A rather difficult question, one might think, to which even the “holistic approach” – to put it bluntly – has no rational answer. However, this question about the individual occurrence of a disease is not posed without an ulterior motive: It simply aims to discredit as unscientific the search for a general reason for the disease that lies outside the individual from the outset.

A popular example of this type of argument is stomach ulcers. Although the dominant “conventional medicine” knows quite well that it is objective stresses acting on the individual that lead to, among other things, an increase in gastric acid production through the excitation of a part of the autonomic nervous system, which in turn damages the gastric mucosa and thus, if it occurs on a sustained basis, causes an ulcer – this finding is of little concern to “holistic medicine.” After all, not every shift worker who is exposed to such stresses will develop a stomach ulcer. So – this is the completely illogical conclusion – the reason for this illness must be found in the person himself, in his “individual life story”:

From the standpoint of holistic medicine, illness is an indication that something in the patient’s life is out of balance.” (H. Milz)

And this “knowledge” is not the beginning of a search for which part of the “life story,” which “life event,” etc., is the cause of this or that illness; somehow everything that affects or is supposed to affect the person is to be taken into account for his illness. A rather total perspective, therefore, which is applied to the illness for the sole purpose of getting rid of the “diagnosis” of the illness as a signal, whereupon the physical dysfunction diagnosed in each case is no longer what it is, but is an expression of something completely different: a “disturbance of the patient’s psychic balance.”

And so every illness has its “meaning,” namely to show the person how he is doing as a “whole person”:

“From this perspective, health and illness do not appear as static states, but as complementary aspects of a unified process. We no longer begin to see illness exclusively as evil, but as a disturbance of the overall equilibrium of man and at the same time as an attempt to restore the harmony of the system.” (F. Teegen, Holistic Health, The Gentle Way of Dealing with Ourselves)

This perspective is not particularly appealing. Whether one is healthy or sick, this small and – one would like to think – not entirely unimportant difference is, viewed psychologically, negligible, as long as one opens one’s self to the idea of a system based on harmony, which is supposed to be what distinguishes the human being.

Quite miserable, this highly praised self that is absorbed in an inner functioning. What is actually supposed to be in “balance”; which “weights,” if any, should be balanced remains rather incomprehensible; on the other hand, it is not tragic for the person, because he only really becomes aware of this “overall balance” when it is disturbed: namely, by the illness which reveals to him that something is wrong with him. And this by no means refers to the banality that the familiar phenomena of illness now affects him in his actions, thoughts and feelings – that would be nothing but the dull tautology that illness “shows” you that you are not the very healthiest. With its silly yardstick that humans are actually summed up in the empty idea of balance, Teegen is aiming at a diagnosis of the illness which the affected person himself can use as a guide, i.e. according to his interpretation as an aspiring balancer of the whole.

Illness, you’re a part of me!

“Someone who longs for health and sees everything sick, every disease as unworthy, as ‘senseless’ and as ‘anti-life’ and only seeks to avoid it, will never be able to experience the ‘big picture of health.’” (K. Pfaff, a Dortmund sociology professor)

The “big picture of health” – illness is a necessary part of this as a “meaningful” part of oneself. Because how else would you know how you are doing? And so feeling the need to get treatment for your major and minor illnesses so they go away is nothing more than an expression of a lowly materialism.

This “message” has now attracted attention far beyond the boundaries of the medical faculty and has found its way into humanities seminars at our universities under beautiful titles such as “Integral Studies.” There – under the expert guidance of a sociologist – it can be spun quite freely and unclouded by any medical knowledge as follows: “Health is always a learning process, health is recovery, convalescence, a ‘fluid balance’ of outside and inside. Health is always a healing process, therapy in the process of becoming.” (Health Studies – a task for everyone, Dortmund 1984)

While the plague as the “scourge of God” was just the right thing for medieval priests preaching a life pleasing to God, modern “diseases of civilization” are just right for the followers of “holistic medicine” to torment a humanity that has only one chance. It is easy to find out how the recommended attention to one’s “inner self” is supposed to pay off. If one pursues this search for meaning, the promise is that one will joyfully welcome one’s illness as a gateway to previously undiscovered realities, a “gain” that does not just reckon on simply becoming healthy again, but should consist in having certain “experiences.” Those, above all, in which one self-actualizes just by submitting to what was “previously unacceptable” and gaining a “higher meaning” from it. So one is then healthy – viewed in a “larger context” – when one is no longer so petty as to seek health as the “mere” elimination of medically diagnosed organ disorders.

Certainly, this achievement of “acceptance,” of seeing a groundbreaking “opportunity” in the unpleasant things one is confronted with, is not possible without doing very ungentle things to one’s mind. You must have a belief in miracles, in everything that will supposedly open up to you when you “encounter” illness, suffering and death, to receive such idiotic messages from your “inner self”:

“How do I get the nervous system to accept the injured regions (e.g. sick leg)? One must send messages to the nervous system, e.g. ‘this is a part of me... this is o.k.’ I accept this part of me . . . But how can you translate such messages into a ‘language’ that the nervous system understands? . . . Quite simply . . . feel, touch.” (F. Teegen)

Or how about an imaginative exercise like this:

“Now let your breath find its rhythm, relax and surrender to the helpful influence of this environment. In this peaceful atmosphere, see yourself as free from all disease. You are complete, whole, healed, enjoying the radiant lightness of sparkling health. Close your eyes and simply let this image sink into you. Through this exercise you have already begun to heal yourself.” (Berkeley Holistic Health Center, The Book of Holistic Health, 1982)

Health as life’s new meaning

“A purely symptomatic therapy, which prevents patients from actively sharing responsibility and a necessary learning and change process, fatally encourages the development of chronic diseases.” (H. Milz)

It’s as popular as it is stupid to accuse the dominant “conventional medicine” of merely curing “symptoms” instead of getting at the “root” of the disease. It’s no secret to any “holistic physician” that the heart, pain and circulatory remedies prescribed by a preferred provider can’t possibly be used to reverse the deterioration of health. The promise of medical help is that the patient’s health will soon be restored to some extent. Which is why doctors regularly prescribe every medication required for this with the note that the patient should only take the absolutely prescribed dose because otherwise he would have to reckon with a lot of “harmful side effects.” Health is what matters when it is constantly being worn out in “working life”! This concern for “public health” is also adopted by the representatives of “holistic medicine” – so insistently that they do not want to stop with the usual appeals to medicine and the state – according to the motto: “Do more for your health.” They like nothing better than the victims of the dominant health-damaging conditions taking it upon themselves to be responsible for their own well-being, and indeed in such a way that they make the constant observation of their physical symptoms for their deeper “meaning” into their new meaning in life:

“Patients learn to investigate the causes of their illness, to demand a careful analysis of their illness from the doctors treating them and to insist that they are actively involved in the treatment of their illnesses and are informed about the various treatment options available” (H. Milz)

Which will certainly get on the nerves of the “attending physician.” Because the “promotion of the layperson’s competence” demanded by “holistic medicine” only makes a medical layperson “competent” in one thing: in constantly talking about and interpreting their “diverse symptoms,” which doesn’t make them any smarter, but does make them very compliant toward the hassles demanded of them in their lives.

The politicians send their greetings

“The pressure to curb healthcare costs is making greater changes than the philosophical discussions of recent years.” (Milz)

The government’s compulsory program to lower the cost of the health of its working population in the future is for the supporters of “holistic medicine” a chance to get a hearing for their ideas about an alternative approach.

And so no “holistic” textbook should be without the humble remark that the government would also be well served by the concepts of alternative medicine:

“Medical education and the expansion of self-help groups are urgently needed if we want to stop the cost explosion in medicine.” (H. Milz)

This won’t blow the minds of any politicians, but so what. The message of “holistic medicine” fits in very well with a state practice that, among other things, is denying health insurance recognition to more and more so-called minor illnesses in order to oblige people to “help themselves.” Learning to live with illness in order to experience one’s “big picture of health” – this message also makes “sense” for the health policy of the “turnaround.”

Not to mention the “health program” of an “Ecological Etiquette Book” where he/she populates running trails like a bunch of little flowers: “As a preventive program, I choose to go for an early morning run in the woods before breakfast (which I often don’t manage) and regularly visit the sauna (which I enjoy). Since then, I've caught far fewer colds. I also have the pleasant feeling that I have made my contribution to reducing healthcare expenditure (1978: a total of DM 165,200,000!). Even when I am ill, I am a dutiful citizen . . .” (R. Grießhammer, Ecological Etiquette Book, Reinbeck 1984)

Good luck!