Holistic Medicine has been defined by Dr. George J Georgiou, Ph.D.,N.D.,DSc (AM), a Holistic Medicine practitioner and Director of the DaVinci Natural Health Centre in Larnaca, Cyprus (www.docgeorge.com) as follows:

Holistic medicine is a system of health care that combines many modalities and models of healthcare such as naturopathy, nutrition, homeopathy, herbal medicine, energy medicine, psychoemotional modalities of healing and much more. The goal of these combined therapies is to help the patient or client achieve optimal physical, mental emotional, social and spiritual health.

Holistic Medicine needs to look at the whole person and how they interact with their environment and the people around them. It needs diagnostic and therapeutic tools to examine and balance the physical, nutritional, environmental, psychological, emotional, social, spiritual and etheric levels of health. It therefore encompasses all modalities of diagnosis and treatment as stated above, including allopathic medicine using drugs and surgery if there are no other safer alternatives.

The ultimate goal of Holistic Medicine is to use all diagnostic and treatment modalities available to optimize the health of the person on all levels of well-being, without doing harm to the person.

The premise of Holistic medicine is to attempt to treat the patient as opposed to the illness. Often a disease such as migraines may have a myriad of different causes in each patient – so there is no standard therapy for migraines as the causes would be different in each person with migraine. This is why it is important to take into account all the causative factors for each person, and ultimately you will be treating the patient and not the disease per se.

We can extrapolate from this that Holistic Medicine is based on a health-care system and not a disease-care system – it is encompasses Preventative Medicine by attempting to catch developing health issues early on, instead of waiting until they reach pathological parameters. Optimizing health should be the ultimate goal of all Holistic Medicine practitioners.

Often Holistic Medicine is not interested in labeling the disease itself as this does not often give information regarding the causes of the symptoms and signs suffered by the person. Holistic Medicine should first identify the causes of the symptoms, which are the body’s way of ‘talking’ to the practitioner, without necessarily being overly concerned with the ‘diagnosis.’

This can be clearly interested when a person goes to their medical doctor with bowel distension and pain after eating, as well as bouts of intermittent diarrhea and constipation. The doctor diagnoses Irritable Bowel Syndrome or IBS and usually gives antispasmodic medication to alleviate the symptoms.

A Holistic Medicine practitioner, however, would begin to investigate the causes of these symptoms – lack of hydrochloric acid production in the stomach and deficiency in pancreatic enzymes leading to poor digestion of food with resulting fermentation and bloating. Food intolerances to wheat, lactose, caffeine and eggs causing inflammatory chemicals such as cytokinines and COX-2’s. Patient also only drinks 2-3 glasses of water daily so is dehydrated and digestive processes suffer as a result. Patient also eating a lot of junk food which is nutritionally deficient, resulting in a downward spiral of nutritional deficiencies. Once all these causes are rectified, then the IBS disappears forever – the IBS was the result of these causative factors provoking the symptoms and discomfort, and not that the person was lacking in anti-spasmodic medication, or any other medication.

Based on the abovementioned example, it is clear to see that there are no limits to the range of diseases and disorders that can be treated in a holistic way – simply find all the potential causative factors, remove them, then help the body to repair, rebuild and rebalance – but this needs to be done on all levels – physical body, energetic body, etheric body, mind, emotions, and spirit. This is why when an individual seeks holistic treatment for a particular illness or condition, other health problems automatically improve without direct intervention as the same causative factors could also be responsible for a myriad of other symptoms.

Holistic Health teaches the person to reach and maintain higher levels of wellness, optimizing health as well as preventing illness. People generally enjoy the vitality and well-being that results from their positive lifestyle changes, and this provides the motivation to continue this process throughout their lives.