Ssemujju Stephen Health wellness and lifestyle choices

Holistic health care

What is it

Holism refers to an approach to health which acknowledges that health depends upon many inter-related components which interact in such a way that the overall effect constitutes health (or illness). Holistic health care refers to an approach to analysing illness and providing healthcare that acknowledges and responds to all factors relevant to the health (or illness) of a person. The word holistic is also used to suggest a morally better and often an alternative nonallopathic treatment approach to illness.

Holistic model of illness

A model:-

Oxford English Dictionary (2006): A simplified or idealzed description or conception of a particular sys-tem, situation, or process that is put forward as a basis for calculations, predictions, or further investigation.

In other words it is an abstract method for describing and analysing the relationships between different factors which contribute to the outcome of interest.

Current models of illness assume that

All illness in an individual can be traced back to some specific, usually single disorder of a part of the body of the patient (disease or pathology). The disorder is assumed to be within the body 2. All symptoms are due to disease, to a disorder within the body. 3. All disease causes symptoms. 4. people have two parts to their existence:the physical and the mental and that these aspects of a person are separate and unrelated
1.

This why our allopathic health services are divided into mental and physical health services. according to this assumption there exists physical (organic) and mental (psychological) diseases only.

The current understanding of illness is, in contrast, linear and reductionist. It assumes that all illness starts with a disorder within the body causing bodily symptoms that lead on to disability and restrictions on social life. This is the biomedical model. However this model is limited, it can not explain the non-organic illness. The other better model is the biopsychosocial model of illness

It acknowledges the importance of factors other than disease. Suggests a systems approach to illness rather than a linear approach. The best way to go is the holistic model which is based on and derived from the WHO ICF (international classification of functioning)
classification of the consequences of disease.

This model:
encompass all factors that relate to illness in some way explains or predicts all illnesses, especially functional illness improves the organisation and commissioning of healthcare

improves clinical management of individual patients through allowing a better analysis and understanding of the whole situation

The model recognises four systems central to the person; organs, the whole person, behavior, and social role function and four contextual factors that influence these systems; personal factors, physical environment, social environment, and time. It also draws attention to two important components of any holistic model of health; choice (free-will) and quality of life.

Illness is then shown to be a socially determined state whereby the patient may initiate being ill but it requires others, usually healthcare professionals to validate illness before it is fully accepted.

conclusion

health and illness should be seen as socially construed states that involve a whole person in their own context, and that effective health care requires both a full analysis of a persons illness to identify all factors relevant to its genesis and a wide range of interventions across several domains.