Holistic Medicine

The growing significance of the holistic or totalistic concept of medical approach to disease has raised problems of importance to physicians generally, but important particularly to authorities responsible for medical education. The average medical graduate finds himself equipped after internship with grounding in the basic sciences of medicine and enough diagnostic acumen to search for and recognize objective disorders of body organs. With the aid of many laboratory devices he can establish a diagnosis and prescribe treatment for obviously pathologic conditions. Beyond this, methods of establishing a single diagnosis may meet with failure in the face of many seemingly unrelated signs and symptoms. Functional and psychosomatic factors have now been repeatedly demonstrated in most of the disease or predisease conditions affecting man, including diabetes, hypertension, ulcers of the stomach and lesser ills. Physicians recognize that they are not being faced with incipient conditions to control but with end results to patch. The establishment of a single diagnosis, which is often assumed to be the proper effort, followed if possible by prescription of a specific remedy, fails to meet the total problem of the patient. This method may frequently cure the lesion but not the person.…