Holistic Medicine

Its Relationship to Evidence-based Medicine

Jul 5, 2007 George Frederick Winter

Doctors pay lip-service to the holistic approach to medicine, being in thrall to the evidence-based approach. Will we see a post-modern rebellion to 'Gray's Anatomy'?

Holistic

There is an increasing trend for doctors to at least try to regard patients from a holistic, so-called bio-psycho-social point of view. An holistic approach, in which the doctor attempts to address and integrate the bodily, personal and social aspects of the patient, is an excellent one … up to a point.

Evidence-based Medicine

However, also prevalent among doctors is the current paradigm of evidence-based medicine. This means that on the one hand, modern medics pay lip service to a holistic approach, but on the other disembody the person and depersonalise the body — the corporeal equivalent of the separation of church and state. Take, for example, Gray’s Anatomy, which denies the fact that anatomy and art had once lain down together and fused upon the velvet-draped dissection tables of the Renaissance. Instead, and frozen in space and time, with a leg here, a torso there, Gray’s bodies are bit-part players in a densely labelled anatomy-by-numbers manual. These are not depictions of the body-parts of people, but mere dry collections of flesh and bones.

Post-Modernism

So perhaps the physicians of a not-too-distant future will go the whole holistic hog and learn their anatomy from a post-modern edition of Gray. For example, shall we see a revenant, baseball-hatted cadaver portrayed, its nervous system jangling from the cappuccino it’s enjoying in Starbucks, its flexed musculature coyly draped in a designer-monogrammed hooded top as it discusses, say, the late Susan Sontag’s literary legacy with a group of lethiferous chums?

Televised Pathology

Encouragingly, some medics have tired of the discipline of displaying the human body in its ‘neutralised’ context. The freak show is resurgent and back with a vengeance. However, the freaks are their impatient patients. They are part of a culture which sees one’s body as a personal canvas to be reshaped as one sees fit, and many of us now crave the ultimate exposure of public dissection — once we’re dead, that is. So step forward Dr Gunter von Hagens, a modern-day Vesalius with a fruity German accent and a Humphrey Bogart hat, who flushes posthumous remains with a plastinating agent and has a carve-up on TV, as happened recently in the United Kingdom.

Oprah Winfrey

But before we get to this final frontier, a golden future awaits the entrepreneurial medic who is prepared to cash in on the baroque tastes of a jaded public. How about the first pay-to-view private consultation TV channel, hosted, say, by Oprah Winfrey? It’s integrated, we watch and we participate in the experience (‘I’ll now palpate your liver, Tracey … ready?’) Now that’s holistic.

The copyright of the article Holistic Medicine in General Medicine is owned by George Frederick Winter. Permission to republish Holistic Medicine in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.