Holistic Thinking in Medicine: Pitfalls and Possibilities

Abstract

Holistic thinking has a history of confused and superficial thought. Smuts coined the term ‘holism’ to designate ‘a factor operative towards the making or creating of wholes in the universe’; but the term is now generally associated with the idea that a whole is more than (or different from) the sum of its parts. Despite tendencies towards over-generalizations and unjustifiable inductive jumps, holistic thinking can nevertheless be productive, and can be linked with broad philosophical standpoints, notably with phenomenology. Such linkage has been of benefit to environmentalism in assessing the ‘environmental crisis’, and parallels can be found in assessing the ‘medical crisis’, both crises being a product of ‘classical’ mechanistic, reductionist thought.

Whether there is continued conflict between reductionist and holistic approaches in medicine, or whether there will be integration or transcendence of opposites in a yet broader holism, is largely in the hands of those engaged in the spread of holistic thinking.