Chapter 1 -- Holistic Perspectives
Chapter 1 Holistic Perspectives. Today we are in need of principles that unify Eastern and West-em, ancient and modern, spiritual and scientific, and holistic and analytical approaches to health and healing. As Norman Cousins states in Anatomy of an Illness: At the various holistic health conferences I attended, I became aware of a troubling contradiction. A movement based on the concept of wholeness was itself becoming unwhole. Two dozen or more schools or approaches of varying validity, not all of them compatible and some of them competitive, were crowding the center of the holistic stage. Some conferences on holistic health seemed more like a congeries of exhibits and separate theories than the occasion for articulating a cohesive philosophy. In Health and Healing: Understanding Conventional and Alternative Medicine, Andrew Weil, M.D. alludes to a similar problem in modern allopathic medicine: Lacking a clear and unified theory, allopathy is a vast and cumbersome body of data