Wholistic Health - The Whole Story

As more organizations joined the "healthy lifestyle" and "holistic health" band wagons, several things became increasingly clear:

(1) Most people know they need to exercise, quit smoking, eat more healthfully, get enough sleep, and manage stress to be physically healthier. In spite of this, they rarely do, even when they have life-threatening heart disease. There are at least two key flaws in our health care system that contribute to our failure to do what we know we "should" be doing: (A) health insurance does not reimburse for treatment of sedentary lifestyle and behavior modification programs; and, (B) most organizations' behavior change programs target the behaviors, not the attitudes and thoughts that directly lead to the unhealthy behaviors. They do not teach people how to change the way they think, which is largely what controls our emotional mood, motivation and our lifestyle choices.

(2) Most organizations, including most hospitals, jumped into holistic health to make money, and abandoned scientific integrity in their dash for the dollars. Allowing these previously reputable organizations to promote unproven techniques, lessens the hospital's credibility rather than increases the credibility of unproven complementary medicine practices. Ironcially, instead of protecting patients from economic fraud, they are participating in it, often charging people for unproven therapies. It is also not uncommon for the hospital's employees and contracted health care providers to make unfounded health claims about the unproven therapies in order to sell them to vulnerable patients. These patients often mistakenly assume that the therapy is safe, and must have proven therapeutic value if the hospital is providing it and licensed health care practitioners are delivering it.

(3) Professional accountability and ethics vary widely across medical professions. In my opinion, everyone using the professional title of "physician", should be held to uniform professional and ethical standards. Currently this is not so. Many chiropractors want to be called "physicians" yet they maintain their own "pharmacies" - profiting on the very substances they "prescribe" for you. Similarly, some nurses and pharmacists venturing into holistic health, also profit on the "treatments" they recommend to their patients, such as multi-level marketed vitamin and herb supplements, often promoting their sales with pseudoscientific explanations rather than true science, and using patient testimonies as "scientific evidence" that a product works. They don't mention the hundreds and thousands of people for whom "treatment" failed or harmed, just the handful for whom, in their opinion, it appeared to work.