Holistic health care, also called integrative, alternative, or complementary medicine, is a field of treatment that is meant to keep or restore your health as much as possible through modalities that are fairly gentle and often more natural than the treatments you would get from a regular doctor. These treatments focus on realigning your body's functions and addressing life issues that your body could be reacting to in a physical way. If you're currently under treatment for something, adding holistic health care could be an appropriate move.
You Have Less-Invasive Options
Holistic treatments tend to be less invasive than a number of regular medical interventions. Whereas your regular doctor might want you to have a cyst aspiration that involves needles, a holistic practitioner may try another treatment that doesn't rely so much on poking a needle into your body. (If you have acupuncture, you'll have to deal with needles, but they do not go nearly as deep into your body.)
You Can Address Social and Lifestyle Elements of Your Health
In holistic medicine, your entire self and life are taken into consideration. If you're suffering from aches and pains, for example, a regular doctor might send you to specialists who examine your joints and bones, but a holistic practitioner will also want to know about what you're eating, how well you're sleeping, if you're dealing with chronic stress, and more. The field considers everything in your life to be interconnected; if you tend to have physical symptoms in response to mental stress, holistic treatments may really help you, for example, as they look at everything going on in your life.
Treatments Often Improve Your General State of Health Along With the Targeted Condition
Because holistic care tends to focus on your whole state of being, the treatments can make you feel better overall even if you're still under treatment for another condition. Hopefully, you'll be eating better, you'll be sleeping better, and treatments like acupuncture could help your overall immune health, for example. All of that can help you along your path to healing. Holistic treatments may help alleviate side effects from more traditional medications that you need to take, or they could even uncover core issues that are contributing to your condition. This is why the field is also called integrative or complementary medicine because it can complement or be used with Western medicine to help you get healthy.
If you think holistic health care could be a good addition to your treatment plan, look for naturopathic doctors, holistic health care centers, and integrative medicine programs. Ask them about the different treatment modalities they offer and see about arranging a consultation.
Contact a local holistic health care service to learn more.
Share15 November 2022
There are many different forms of health care. There are many different ways to keep yourself healthy or to restore health. Natural health care is just one option. It happens to be the option we will discuss on this website. There are a lot of misconceptions about natural health care, so to be honest, we are pretty excited to post factual information and clear some of them up. Our readers tend to be people who are passionate about their own health and who want to take a more natural approach. However, we welcome anyone who is interested in reading what we have to say.