|BHMA ESSAY 2013 |
|The importance of holism in medical care today |
|and ways this can be promoted |
| |
|Kundan Iqbal |
|Newcastle University |

|“…every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease…’TOLSTOY |

The importance of holism

The term ‘holism’ was coined by philosopher Jan Smuts in 1926, derived from the Greek hólos, meaning ‘whole’[1]. Aristotle captured the essence of holism in his Metaphysics when he stated ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’. Applied to healthcare, holism is the art and science of caring for a person in a way which considers all aspects of their body, mind, spirituality and emotional state in relation to “[other] individuals, the environment, or populations, either separately or in various combinations”[2].

In the traditional biomedical model, health is simply viewed as absence of pathology alongside normal function. Treatment or cure involves drugs, procedures and surgeries, prescribed by a knowledgeable physician. Essentially arising as a reaction against biomedical reductionism, a model of medicine in which patients are arguably viewed