What's the Difference Between Alternative Medicine and Holistic Health?

The two are not concepts of the same dimension at all - alternative therapy is a collective name for a type of intervention method that is opposite to modern mainstream Western medicine, while holistic health is an underlying logic for viewing health and dealing with health problems. This is the most essential difference.

I have been doing health management for almost 7 years, and I have seen too many people tie the two together, and even think that using alternative therapies is to practice overall health. In fact, they are led astray by marketing rhetoric. For example, the girl with polycystic cysts I met a while ago spent more than 30,000 yuan to buy a package from a "natural therapy institution" to do moxibustion and drink customized herbal drinks every week. The institution kept saying that it was an overall health treatment, but after half a year of adjustment, her aunt still didn't come. When I asked, I found out that the other party had never asked her about her diet. In order to lose weight, she only ate cold salads every day for a year, and her body fat rate was as low as 16%. In this case, even welding a moxibustion box to her body would be useless.

Don't say that ordinary people can't tell the difference. There are now a lot of debates about the boundaries between the two in the industry. Most practitioners who support alternative therapies will use traditional medicine as an example, saying that whether it is syndrome differentiation and treatment of traditional Chinese medicine or physical conditioning of Ayurveda, they inherently have a holistic view, and using these alternative therapies is in itself practicing holistic health. ； However, scholars in the field of public health do not agree with this statement. They feel that 90% of alternative therapies on the market under the banner of overall health have skipped the most basic full-dimensional health assessment. In essence, they rely on information gaps to sell high-premium products, which is completely contrary to the core of overall health.

To use an inappropriate analogy, overall health is like buying a game console that suits you. You have to choose the CPU, graphics card, memory, and cooling according to the type of games you play, your budget, and your usage habits. All accessories must be adapted to run smoothly.； The alternative therapy is a certain type of optional accessories. For example, if you choose water cooling, it does not mean that your host will meet your needs. If the CPU and graphics card do not match at all, no matter how good the cooling is, the card will still be a card.

Of course, this does not mean that overall health excludes alternative therapies. When I make plans for clients, I often use alternative therapies such as acupuncture and auricular acupuncture, but the premise is that I have understood the other person’s work and rest, diet, emotions, and even family relationships, all factors that may affect health. Alternative therapies are only a small supplement to the entire plan, and they are definitely not the whole story.

In fact, for ordinary consumers, there is no need to dwell on the concept. They just need to remember one criterion: whether the other party is touting "alternative therapies" or "holistic health," if they come up and push you a product and say that a certain method can cure all problems, just turn away. Health management that truly puts "whole" in mind will always focus on you first and then find a suitable solution, rather than trying to apply a set of methods to everyone.