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March 27, 2024 15 mins

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Join us on a journey through the intricate landscape of medical philosophy as we explore the dynamic interplay between reductionism and holism. In this thought-provoking podcast, we delve into the contrasting perspectives that shape modern healthcare and challenge traditional notions of disease and wellness.

At the heart of our discussion lies the age-old debate between reductionism and holism. While reductionism champions the idea that understanding the smallest components of a system unlocks the secrets of the whole, holism contends that the synergy of interconnected parts yields emergent properties beyond individual comprehension.

Through engaging narratives and insightful anecdotes, we unravel the complexities of these philosophical frameworks and their implications for medical practice. From the biomedical reductionism that underpins our understanding of disease to the holistic approaches revolutionizing patient care, we examine the strengths and limitations of each perspective.

So, whether you're a healthcare professional seeking to broaden your understanding of medical philosophy or a curious listener intrigued by the complexities of human health, tune in to our podcast as we navigate the intricate terrain of reductionism and holism in healthcare. Together, let's embark on a journey to embrace the richness and diversity of approaches that define modern medicine.

Pubmed "holistic" graph
Joshua Freeman: Towards a Definition of Holism
The history of reductionism versus holistic approaches to scientific research
"Touching Work" by Dr Carrie Ann Purcell
Whole Health
Total Pain
The UK's Holistic Massage
Alternative therapies: are they holistic?

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Corey Rivera (00:07):
Welcome to the Rub .
I'm your host, corey Rivera,licensed massage therapist and
information magpie.
In today's episode, we're goingto be talking about the word
holism, because I don't thinkthat word means what you think
it means.
In order to understand holism,I'm first going to talk about

(00:29):
reductionism.
It's evil twin.
Separated at birth, holism andreductionism have become sworn
enemies in the fight to dominatemedicine.
Just kidding, holism andreductionism do tend to be
pitted against each other,though.
Okay, reductionism is the ideathat understanding the small

(00:50):
parts of something will help youunderstand a big something.
Also, understanding those smallpieces might help you transfer
what you know to somethingrelated.
For example, can we understandhow the brain works by
understanding how neurons work?
And if you take it a stepfurther, can we understand how
neurons work by understandingtheir pieces, like the nucleus

(01:11):
and the mitochondriaMitochondria powerhouse of the
cell.
Reductionism is a broad ideathat is applied to all kinds of
sciences.
In physics, reductionism hastaken us from the movement of
the planets all the way down toquantum physics, and quantum
physics has given us very coolthings like solar panels and GPS
.

(01:33):
Biomedical reductionism is thebelief that all disease has a
biological cause.
Cells act up, bacteria gets outof control, we get sick.
The idea of disease itself iscentral to biomedical
reductionism and in that view,the role of medicine is to fix a
disease.
This leads to ideas aboutphysicians sort of being like
mechanics they diagnose and fixa problem.

(01:54):
Biomedical reductionism alsotends to focus on strictly
biological explanations.
For example, yes, you have aB12 deficiency, but is the lack
of B12 because you aren'tabsorbing what you eat a
biological reason, or is itbecause you can't afford
groceries?
Biomedical reductionism can bea great way to miss systemic

(02:14):
problems.
Despite that, biomedicalreductionism has gotten us quite
far.
Our progress in understandingcancer treatments and why some
work better than others isbecause of reductionism.
Our knowledge of how cells workallows us to choose a better
treatment for each individualperson.
Like all systems, at some pointreductionism fails us.
It turns out that people arenot a basket of disease, they

(02:37):
are people.
Because reductionism is abouttaking things apart, we've also
tried to take humans apart, likethe idea that body and mind are
separate things.
So relatively recently, we inthe West have turned to a
different idea wholism.
The idea of a hole beinggreater than the sum of its

(02:58):
parts is a direct quote fromAristotle, but the word holism
was created only about a hundredyears ago A hundred years Like
we had cars at that time.
In 1926, a man named Jan Smuts,a South African general and
philosopher, published a bookcalled Holism and Evolution.
He took the word from the Greekholos, meaning holes.

(03:19):
Smuts actually had a fewdefinitions for the word holism
in his own book, but the onethat really caught on is the
tendency in nature to form holesthat are greater than the sum
of the parts through creativeevolution.
So holism is the idea thatsometimes one plus one equals
potato.
When you combine small pieces,they make something new, often

(03:39):
something you could never haveguessed just by looking at those
pieces.
For example, sometimes when youcombine things, they become
Captain Planet, and whileCaptain Planet is pretty
straightforward about fightinglooters and polluters, most
things that qualify as holisticget really complicated because
there's so many parts to takeinto account.
Because you're listening tothis podcast and not one about

(04:00):
accounting practices, I'm goingto assume that you think of
holism in a health-related way.
But there is actually holisticaccounting and linguistics and
physics and education.
Even though Jan Smuts coinedthe phrase in 1926, it didn't
really start to gain traction inmedicine until the 1960s.
Okay, nerd moment.
The research database, pubmedhas a feature where you can

(04:22):
search for a term and it willshow you a graph of usage over
time.
It is very cool.
You should totally check thelink in the show notes.
If you do, you will see that in1950, there were three
published academic articles thatuse the term holistic, and then
50 years later, in the year2000, there were 507 articles
published.
And in 2023, last year, over5,000 articles with the word

(04:47):
holistic were published 5,000 inone year.
The problem with 5,000 articlesis that each author tends not
to define their particular useof the word, which leads to a
lot of mixed meanings.
Like which whole are you talkingabout when you say holistic?
Is it your general mindset?
How wide a net are you castingwith your holistic approach?

(05:08):
Because what you considerholistic has everything to do
with the level you work at.
In this great article by a mannamed Joshua Friedman, link in
the show notes, he says thelargest scale that is relevant
to you that you pay attention tois probably what you define as
wholism.
He means that your personaldefinition of wholism is all

(05:28):
about your perspective.
For a cell biologist, an organis holistic the sum of its parts
becoming a new thing For asocial worker.
It's about a person being partof a family and other social
systems.
Are you talking about yourresearch evaluation methods
being holistic?
One of the common struggles ofresearch is figuring out what to

(05:51):
measure and how to measure it.
Heelwell's massage therapyresearch in hospitals tends to
be more concerned with theexperience of pain as opposed to
a pain score, and the termexperience covers a lot of
ground.
It includes symptoms liketiredness and depression and
well-being metrics like qualityof life and outlook.
Okay, what about the termholistic therapy?

(06:15):
This one kind of bugs me,because it's easy to say you do
holistic therapy and it looksreally good in marketing and
search engine optimization, butit's not very easy to define and
, like all those academicarticles, people don't even try,
although it might not bepossible for a solo practitioner
to have a fully holisticpractice.
But we'll get there in a second.

(06:36):
First, I want to talk aboutthree examples of medical holism
that are used right now.
The first example is from theUS Department of Veteran Affairs
.
They call their program wholehealth.
Their model includes the piecesthat make up a person's health,
like body, mind, spirit, but italso identifies self-care,
professional care and thecommunity that the patient lives

(06:57):
in as factors that affectwell-being.
The second example is calledtotal pain.
This is a concept that's usedin palliative care.
It was developed by Dame CicelySaunders, who is a major leader
in the modern hospice movement.
Total pain says that pain ismore than physical.
Sometimes when patients talkabout pain, they are talking
about a combination of factors.

(07:18):
It's their body, but it's alsoworry about their family or
their fear of death.
All the things causing themdistress are included in the
pain score that they then giveto the nurse.
That means that at some pointopioids aren't the whole
solution.
The patient may need a socialworker to help with their family
or a hospital chaplain forspiritual support.

(07:40):
My last example of medicalholism is particular to the
United Kingdom and specificallyabout massage therapy.
I read this dissertation calledTouching Work by Dr Kerry Ann
Purcell.
It's specifically aboutholistic massage and for 300-ish
pages I was confused by what Ifelt was a marketing term and
why it was on every page atleast once.
So I dug a little more and Ifound a massage therapist who

(08:02):
defined the term.
He said that he is a wholeperson and he expects his client
to be a whole person.
And having two whole people ina room means that each massage
is different every time, becauseevery day we are all different
people.
He takes all those differencesinto account in his approach and
in the United Kingdom this iscalled holistic massage, and I

(08:22):
thought, well, isn't that allmassage?
And then I reexamined my biasesBecause no, no, it's not.
If someone thinks of massage asstrictly biological therapy as
opposed to the biopsychosocialtherapy you and I know it to be,
then it's not super holistic.
I call this type of massagemeat massage.

(08:43):
If anyone in the room massagetherapist or client could be
replaced by a pile of meat andnothing would change, then it is
not the United Kingdomdefinition of holistic massage.
At Heal Well, this differenceis defined by adjusting your
language from working on toworking with, and I have been
gently corrected several timesbecause language is both
important and hard.

(09:07):
Okay, you might be wondering, orI hope you're wondering, why
complementary and alternativemedicine are automatically
considered holistic.
Honestly, I think it's becausewe're really into binary
thinking yes or no, either orthis, not that.
And in order to have a binarysetup, you have to have two
sides that disagree.

(09:27):
So if biomedicine isreductionist, then the thing
called alternative medicine mustbe the opposite, so we call it
holistic.
In the vast collection oftherapies we've decided to call
alternative or complementary,there are certainly ideas that
biomedicine doesn't focus on.
Alternative or complementarytherapies tend toward the idea

(09:49):
that factory default for a bodyis health and medicine's job is
to return a person to health,not necessarily eradicate
disease.
It might seem like a fine line,but the decision to focus on
creation or destruction hasimplications for the rest of
your practice as a massagetherapist.
Are you destroying adhesions orare you creating a calm nervous

(10:09):
system?
It feels different, right?
Also, side note, you shouldn'ttry to destroy adhesions, but
that's a topic for a differentepisode.
The other thing thatalternative or complementary
medicine often has in common isa focus on the individual as the
vehicle of health.
Instead of a physician makingyou well, you make yourself well
.
This is great for the conceptof agency, but it also leads to

(10:32):
blaming people for being sick.
This kind of wholism can be agreat way to miss systemic
problems.
Wait, didn't I say that earlier?
I did, I did, but I saidbiomedical reductionism is a
great way to miss systemicproblems.
Think about that.
Okay, remember when I said thatthe idea of a holistic therapy

(10:57):
kind of bugs me.
Our friend Joshua Friedman, whotalked about your personal
definition of holism, says thatthe term holistic therapy is
kind of an oxymoron.
Saying your therapy or modalityis the miracle answer to
everything is essentiallybiomedical reductionism.
It doesn't matter how manytimes you use the H word, it is
no different than thinkingmedication is the answer to all

(11:19):
problems.
Here's an example of this I sawa rheumatologist a few years ago
and they had a very cheerfulresident with them.
I was there because I'mhypermobile and I have a
smattering of other weirdsymptoms, so I thought maybe
there was enough for a diagnosisand treatment of some kind.
No luck, by the way, but Idigress.
Anyway, I asked therheumatologist about exercise

(11:41):
when your ligaments don't holdso well.
Choosing a form of exercise ishard and hiring a personal
trainer or getting access to aswimming pool wasn't financially
possible for me.
The resident excitedly offeredyoga and both the rheumatologist
and I winced.
Having bad ligaments meanshaving a bad sense of
proprioception, your sense ofwhere you are in space.
So unless my joints are fullyflexed I don't get good sensory

(12:04):
input, which is why I sitcross-legged pretty much
anywhere.
I think I can get away with, sodoing yoga by myself when I
can't tell where my hips are.
Bad plan, unsupervised.
Yoga is not for everyone, butthe eager resident was so used
to offering yoga as a solutionfor everything they didn't take
time to consider if it was rightfor me.

(12:25):
Please keep in mind that youcannot be medically holistic by
yourself.
You would go crazy.
You'd have to be an expert inbiology, psychology, sociology,
communication, diagnosis,government policy.
Your brain would explode.
You would twist yourself somany ways you would turn into a
pretzel.
This is part of the reason.
Professionals have a scope ofpractice and if you want to take

(12:48):
care of a person in a holisticmanner, find people that you can
work with and refer to and Idon't just mean refer, as in
sending clients to someone else.
I mean having a person you canask questions to and run ideas
by.
Real holistic practice requiresa team, because you don't want
to be a pretzel.
So what's the moral of all this?

(13:08):
Super simple it's notreductionism or holism, it's
both and, if possible, at thesame time.
Any word that ends in ism is aphilosophy.
It is a model used for thinkingabout the world and, like all
models, it will fail at somepoint.
So, instead of trying to decidewhich one is better.
You need to look at what isuseful in your current moment.

(13:31):
Think of isms like lenses.
You can take off your glassesand use a microscope or a
telescope.
You can try someone else'sglasses.
Think about what lens you werechoosing and why you were
choosing that one.
When a client is standing infront of you telling you about
how their back hurts and alsothat they're a caregiver for
their sick parent, you might puton your holism lenses and think

(13:53):
about the total pain concept.
Maybe you do your treatment andthen you also refer them to a
talk therapist or a supportgroup.
Or maybe your client is tellingyou about how their back hurts
and how yesterday theyaccidentally spent 19 hours
cleaning out their flower beds.
So you zoom in and focus on amore orthopedic approach.
You and your practice don'thave to pick a side, but I hope

(14:16):
next time you're peering throughyour lenses you realize which
ones you have on and that youchose them on purpose.
Thank you for listening.
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