Allopathic vs. Holistic Medicine: Which Should You Choose?

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Katherine Greene Housh, One of Thousands of Health and Fitness Coaches on Noomii.

If you search the Internet today, you won’t be hard-pressed to find pages and pages of opinion about the superiority of allopathic vs. holistic medicine and vice versa. Some of it even borders on passionate propaganda.

To these fierce advocates I pose the challenge: “Why not both?” Rather than staunchly supporting only one or the other, a balanced approach makes it possible to build a bridge between the conventional and the alternative.

Allopathic Medicine: Outside-In

Whether you label it traditional, conventional, or westernized, this view of health and disease asserts that problems and disease originate from outside your body (such as germs) and then invade it, causing you to become sick and exhibit symptoms (such as pain, fever, and nausea).

At this point, medical doctors may prescribe medications such as antibiotics to fight infection, narcotics to alleviate pain, or immunosuppressants to reduce inflammation. There is no denying the importance of these options in cases of severe trauma or advanced disease.

If the disease localizes within a vulnerable body part (such as a lung or appendix) and symptoms no longer respond to drugs, then that body part may need to be treated with surgery.

Holistic Medicine: Inside-Out

A holistic or “whole person” perspective differs in that it claims the cause of all disease lies within
your body and that all parts are interrelated and able to heal themselves from the inside out when provided with the right support.

Holistic practitioners use a variety of treatment techniques to provide this support as they help you take responsibility for their own well-being. These may include education on lifestyle changes related to diet and exercise or therapies such as acupuncture, chiropractic care, homeopathy, massage therapy, naturopathy, and others.

These forms of healing take into consideration your body, mind, and spirit, believing that these are interdependent and if one is not working properly, than all the other parts will be effected as well.

Building a Bridge

At first glance, it is easy to conclude that there is a place for both mindsets in today’s health care environment. Sometimes disease in the form of infection is caused by an external pathogen and has progressed to the point where it needs to be treated with a synthetic drug, such as an antibiotic. These are the tools that allopathic medicine can provide.

At the same time, to stop there ignores the bigger questions of why your internal immune system was too weak to fight the infection on its own and how can it be rebuilt? These are the questions that a holistic approach is more likely to answer, but which are not usually asked by a Western medical doctor. Why is that the case?

Follow the Money

Studies have shown that the US healthcare system is the most expensive in the world (spending over a trillion dollars a year) and yet it ranks last in terms of performance when compared with other developed countries. Billions of dollars are invested in conventional medical research, but funds are comparatively scarce for researching complementary and alternative methods of treatment.

A major shift occurred in the late 1980s with the evolution of managed care when corporate executives were accused of being more interested in personal profit than patient health. Pharmaceuticals were promoted as modern-day miracles and many alternative treatments were dismissed as unscientific and anecdotal, due to the lack of clinical findings available.

This pattern has created a biased system with that continues to put money into “proving” what is already known and allocating resources to areas (such as conventional medicine) for which reasonably good evidence already exists at the expense of other areas (such as alternative medicine) for which no or less evidence currently exists.

Listen to Your Gut

The truth is that even if more funding were available for research, many of the core principles of holism are harder to quantify. For example, how do you measure the effects of unconditional love and support as a powerful healer or the correlation between level of responsibility you take for your own health and well-being and the severity of your symptoms?

Ask any patient who has found success in managing and healing a chronic illness by supplementing traditional treatments with these complementary techniques and they can tell you how they feel about a holistic approach. According to modern “science,” these results may be merely “anecdotal,” or unreliable observations, but as long as a lack of funding remains for research, there is little hope that alternative treatments will reach the same status as their conventional counterparts.

Make an Informed Decision

Instead, as a patient you are left to your own devices as you conduct your own research through trial and error to find relief from chronic pain and illness when Western medicine provides only some (but not all) of the answers. In its failure to provide findings about the potential benefits of holistic treatment, modern research has also neglected to prove its claims that these treatments may be ineffective at best or dangerous at worst.

Therefore, anecdotal evidence remains all that you have to refer to in most cases and the feedback is positive from those who use modalities such as acupuncture, chiropractic care, and massage therapy, with few or no side effects.

Before choosing to explore one of these options, it is always best to consult with your physician to make sure they don’t have any outright objections or concerns related to your specific circumstances, but usually the response will be one of indifference or approval. Ultimately, the final evaluation of whether a treatment is helpful and effective is yours to make.