4.1: Isn't western medicine reductionistic and alternatives holistic?
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This article is from the Scientific Skepticism FAQ, by Paul Johnson Paul@treetop.demon.co.uk with numerous contributions by others.
4.1: Isn't western medicine reductionistic and alternatives holistic?
Practitioners of alternative therapies often put forward the idea that
modern scientific medicine is reductionistic: it concentrates on those
parts of the body that are not working properly, and in so doing it
reduces the patient to a collection of organs. Alternative therapies
try to consider the patient as a whole (a holistic approach).
This is a fine piece of rhetoric, but it's wrong. It is true that
modern medicine looks at the details of diseases, trying to find out
exactly what is going wrong and what is causing it. But it also looks
at the life of the patient, and tries to understand how the patient
interacts with his/her environment and how this interaction can be
improved. For instance, smoking is known to cause a wide variety of
medical problems. Hence doctors advise patients to give up smoking as
well as treating the individual illnesses that it causes. When a
patient presents with an illness then the doctor will not only treat
the illness but also try to understand how this illness was caused in
order to avoid a recurrence.
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