Summary

Holistic health means looking at the whole person rather than one problem at a time. Your digestion, sleep, stress, hormones and immune system all affect one another, and the research on those connections is now extensive. This post explains what holistic health means in practice and where the idea came from. It sets out what the research shows about care that treats you as a whole person, and what happens in my clinic when I take that approach with you.

Key takeaways

• Holistic health is a way of understanding your body as one connected system, not a set of separate parts.
• The idea is old and it has always worked. What is new is the research showing why: stress raises inflammatory signalling within the hour, short sleep weakens your immune defences, and your gut bacteria are in constant conversation with your brain.
• Nearly a quarter of people registered with a GP have two or more long term conditions, and mental and physical conditions tend to appear together.
• When care looks at the whole person, people do better, and that has now been measured.
• Your relationships count as much as your diet. Loneliness and isolation raise the risk of early death by roughly a quarter to a third.
• A holistic consultation is long by design, because the connections between your systems only become visible when someone has time to look for them.

The word holistic has been used so loosely that it can be hard to know what it means any more. In clinical practice it has a plain meaning. It describes an approach that looks at you as a whole person, with a health history, a life and a set of body systems that influence one another, rather than as one problem on its own. That approach is the foundation of how I work as a medical herbalist. It is also where a large body of modern research has been heading for thirty years.

What holistic health means

Holistic health starts from a simple observation. Nothing in your body works on its own. Your gut talks to your brain and your sleep shapes your immune system. A stressful month can show in your digestion, your skin and your mood at the same time. So when one part of you is struggling, the useful question is rarely “what is wrong with this part”. It is “what is going on in the whole of you that has left this part struggling”.

That question changes what a practitioner looks at. A holistic approach to your health takes in your food, sleep, stress, relationships, history and environment, because each of them feeds into the others. It also changes the aim. Rather than addressing one thing at a time, the aim is to find and address what set the pattern off in the first place. Addressing the root cause is what makes herbal medicine different from conventional medicine. It is a difference in the question each approach is asking, not a criticism of either.

Where the idea comes from

Traditional systems of medicine, including the Western herbal tradition I trained in, have always understood illness as something that happens to a person in a context. They have always asked about the rest of that person’s life. The word itself was coined in 1926, when Jan Smuts wrote of holism as the tendency in nature to form wholes greater than the sum of their parts.

Twenty years later the idea entered mainstream medicine. The World Health Organization was founded in 1948, and its constitution defined health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease. That definition has been argued over ever since, but the core of it has stood. Health is about the whole of you, and the social and mental parts count as much as the physical.

How your body systems affect each other

The reason a holistic approach works is not philosophical. It is physiological, and the research behind it is now detailed. Take stress. Researchers pooled 34 studies of acute psychological stress and found that a single stressful challenge raised circulating inflammatory markers such as interleukin 6. The largest rise came about 90 minutes afterwards. Inflammation is your immune system’s response to threat, so a stressful morning reaches your immune system before lunch. A stressful year keeps it on a low simmer.

Sleep affects your immune system just as strongly. A major review of sleep and immunity found that sleep supports your body’s defences, is linked to a lower risk of infection, and improves the response to vaccination. Prolonged short or broken sleep, by contrast, can lead to chronic low-grade inflammation of the kind associated with diabetes and heart disease. So the woman who tells me she has caught every cold going since her sleep fell apart is describing a real mechanism.

Your gut is at the centre of all this. The trillions of bacteria in your intestines communicate with your brain through your immune system, through the vagus nerve and through the compounds they produce. Researchers now describe a microbiota gut brain axis that stress can disturb at every stage of life. The traffic goes both ways. Stress changes gut movement, secretion and permeability, and it alters the bacteria themselves. That is one reason a period of strain so often shows in your digestion first.

Put those findings together and you have the physiology behind holistic health. Stress, sleep, immunity and digestion are not four separate topics. They are one system seen from four angles. Treating any one of them without looking at the others means working with a quarter of the information.

Why one condition rarely comes on its own

If your body works as one system, you would expect health problems to cluster, and they do. Researchers examined the records of 1.75 million people registered with GP practices in Scotland. They found that 23 per cent had two or more long term conditions. Most people over 65 had more than one, but the larger number of people living with several conditions were under 65. The presence of a mental health condition rose steeply with the number of physical ones. The authors concluded that health care organised around single diseases does not fit how illness actually presents.

That is the pattern I see in my patients. The bloating, the broken sleep, the low mood and the aching joints do not come as four separate problems, even if they end up with four separate appointments. They come as one person whose systems are under strain, and they usually share a cause or two. Finding those shared causes is the real work. It is only possible when someone looks at all of it at once.

What the research shows about whole person care

Care built on this principle has been measured. The largest study followed 7,252 people, two thirds of them women. It compared people seen in a whole person, root cause model of care with matched patients seen in ordinary primary care. At six months, the whole person group showed larger improvements in a standard measure of physical health. Among those followed for a full year, the gap was wider still. The authors called the association beneficial and sustainable.

Where whole person approaches have been tried in the UK, the same lesson comes back. Social prescribing is where a link worker helps someone with practical and social support alongside their usual care. A review of 17 UK studies of it found that the approaches which worked best were the ones built around the individual person.

Your relationships belong in this picture too. A meta-analysis of studies on loneliness and isolation found that social isolation raised the likelihood of early death by 29 per cent. Loneliness raised it by 26 per cent and living alone by 32 per cent, effects comparable to established risk factors. The finding was stronger in people under 65. A practitioner who never asks who you have around you is missing something that matters as much as your blood results.

What a holistic consultation looks like

The practical difference between a holistic approach and any other is time, and what gets done with it. GPs work under real pressure. A review of consultation lengths across 67 countries found that for about half the world’s population an appointment lasts five minutes or less. Nobody can trace the connections between your sleep, your gut and your stress in five minutes, and it would be unfair to expect it.

My initial consultation lasts 90 minutes, and it starts before you arrive. You complete an intake form and send any recent test results. You also keep a food diary for three consecutive days, including at least one weekend day, because how you eat on a Saturday tells me things a weekday never would. Then we go through the whole of it together. We cover what you are experiencing now, when it began, and what was happening in your life at the time. We cover how you sleep, how you digest, what your energy does across the day, what your periods did or do, and what has already been tried. I always have to dig a little deeper than the reason you came, because the cause is usually somewhere else.

Only then do I decide what to do about it. Herbal medicine is matched to the person rather than the label. So two women who both come to me with bloating may leave with quite different formulas, because the bloating is coming from different places. One may need her digestion warmed and moved along. The other may need her stress response calmed before her gut will improve at all. The herbs are the visible part of the work, and the case taking that came before them is what makes them the right ones.

What this means day to day

You can see these connections in your own life once you know to look for them.

Protect your sleep first, because it affects everything else. Your immune system, your mood and your appetite are all regulated overnight, and the research above shows how quickly they suffer when sleep goes. If yours is poor, I have written about natural remedies for deep sleep in more detail.

Feed the bacteria that talk to your brain. A wide variety of plant foods across the week, with some fermented foods among them, is the change that helps to support your gut ecosystem most reliably. That ecosystem changes with age, so the variety matters more after 40, not less.

Notice what a period of stress does to your body, rather than treating it as a purely mental event. If your digestion or your sleep changes in a difficult month, that is the connection at work. Calming your nervous system will often do more for your gut than anything aimed at your gut directly. And, keep your people close. The evidence on isolation is as strong as the evidence on diet, and it is the part of health most easily neglected when you are unwell.

Where this leaves you

Holistic health is not a product or a course of pills. It is a way of understanding how your body works. The science of the last thirty years has confirmed what traditional medicine has always understood. Your systems are connected, strain in one shows in the others, and the cause of a problem is often somewhere other than where it shows. If you have been seen one problem at a time and feel that nobody has looked at the whole of you, a personalised consultation can help you understand what is happening and provide support to fit your situation.