What is the difference between alternative medicine and holistic health

The two are essentially not dimensional concepts at all - alternative therapy is a type of specific treatment/conditioning method that is comparable to mainstream Western medicine intervention and can be implemented, while holistic health is a health cognitive framework that treats people as a complete system. This is the core difference.

Last week, a young man who works in Internet operations came to me and said that after staying up for more than three months, it now takes two hours to fall asleep while lying down. His friend gave him two ideas, either taking melatonin or applying acupuncture on the ear to press beans. Both of them essentially deal directly with the symptom of "inability to sleep." Among them, acupuncture on the ear is a typical alternative therapy. The goal is the same as taking sleeping pills and melatonin, but it uses a different intervention method from mainstream Western medicine, which belongs to the category of "alternative".

I didn’t recommend any treatment methods to him at the time. I first took him to figure out his living situation for half a month, and then I discovered that not only had he been eating late-night snacks heavy in oil and salt every day for the past two months, he had just broken up with his girlfriend of three years last week, and he collapsed on the sofa every day after get off work. I keep scrolling on my mobile phone until early in the morning, and my cervical spine is as hard as an old slate. In this case, just relying on auricular acupoints or taking melatonin will last for three to five days at most, and I will definitely still have insomnia after a while. This is to look at the problem from the perspective of overall health, and not just focus on a certain one. Instead, we need to look at the corresponding method for each symptom, but to link up the physiological state, emotion, living habits and even social status. The final plan given to him included shoulder and neck moxibustion twice a week, a requirement of walking for 20 minutes every day after dinner, and asking him to play ball with friends once a week to complain, and even reminded him to replace his late night snack with warm milk. You see, there is no "replacement or not" in this, as long as the method is good for his overall condition, he can use it, whether it is mainstream or niche.

Nowadays, many people have misunderstandings about these two concepts. They either think that alternative therapies are a lie, or that talking about overall health means rejecting Western medicine. In fact, this is not the case. A while ago, I accompanied my mother to the cardiology department for a follow-up visit. After the doctor prescribed antihypertensive drugs, she specifically told her to stop arguing with my father, dance in the park for half an hour every day, and stop worrying about trivial matters at home. This is actually a typical holistic health approach, which has long been integrated into the management of chronic diseases in conventional medical care. It is not a niche metaphysics at all. There are also many alternative therapies that have been proven effective by evidence-based medicine. For example, acupuncture relieves the vomiting reaction after radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Nowadays, many tertiary cancer hospitals routinely recommend it. It is not an evil idea at all. But if someone says that cancer can be cured by taking herbs without chemotherapy, it is just using the name of alternative therapy to cut leeks, and it has nothing to do with overall health.

If you really can't tell the difference, think of your body as a car that has been driven for several years. The alternative therapy is that you do not use the original parts from the 4S shop, but choose a compliant third-party part to replace it. Whether it is easy to use or not depends on whether the part is suitable for your car model;