Abstract
Though often used interchangeably, the terms, medical “self-care” and “holistic medicine” are not at all synonymous. Self-care is an attempt by ordinary people to learn and use medical techniques for themselves. It is a reaction to the systematic disempowerment of patients within contemporary medical institutions. But self-care does not necessarily involve a critique of contemporary medical science itself. Holistic medicine, by contrast, does begin with a critique of medical science, and proposes an alternative direction. Holistic medicine rejects not so much a certain social role, I will argue, as a certain metaphysics.
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Notes
A note about terms. The old, familiar medical model is being challenged from so many different directions these days that what to call that model is itself in question. Each alternative medicine describes the prevailing medicine as the opposite of itself. Some of the literature in holistic medicine calls it “scientific” medicine, to contrast it with a less detached and mechanical view of the body [20]. But homeopaths argue that orthodox medicine is not truly scientific; only an alternative medicine, their own, is really science [5]. Their term, “allopathy”, makes the contrast in terms of medicine’s approach to the presumed causal agents of disease. Others see the dominant medical institutions much more as institutions: thus they use more sociological labels, like “institutional” or “conventional” medicine. Phyllis Mattson calls it “cosmopolitan” medicine [14]. I choose “orthodox” mainly because it seems more neutral than most of the other terms. Probably only once the prevailing model has been bracketed and put in its place in a more pluralistic system — or once we have moved past the present orthodoxy entirely — are we likely to see it clearly enough as a whole to have any adequate label.
Often the term “self-help” is used to distinguish feminist self-care from medically-sponsored self-care ([3], pp. 575-576).
I owe this point and the one that follows to Dorian Gregory.
The debate over the homeopaths’ use of enormously diluted drugs also comes back to homeopathy’s looser commitment to materialism. Some tests appear to confirm the efficacy of solutions so dilute that no atom of the diluted substance is likely to remain in the patient’s dosage. Explanations are not easy to come by, but homeopaths have been known to suggest that, as Brian Inglis puts it, “the process of attenuation makes a drug more potent by reducing the material substance to a point where only the energy remains” ([12], pp. 82-84).
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Weston, A. (1992). On the Body in Medical Self-Care and Holistic Medicine. In: Leder, D. (eds) The Body in Medical Thought and Practice. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7924-7_5
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