What is holistic medicine?

What is Holistic Medicine?

If health is like a garden, western medicine removes the noxious weeds with strong herbicide. Holistic medicine looks at why the weeds took root in the first place, and then tends the garden: enriching it with compost, nurturing beneficial pollinators and soil organisms, and planting seeds so that the living ecosystem of the body can thrive.

Holistic medicine approaches health and healing by addressing the broader context of a person’s life: body, mind, circumstance, and using multiple paths to restore balance and address issues.

A Broader View of Healing

A holistic approach looks at the relationships between systems: how stress affects digestion, how hormones influence sleep, how emotions are held in the body, and how personal history impacts the ability to heal.

It recognizes that what happens in the body is inseparable from what happens in our relationships, our work, our sense of belonging, and even seasonal cycles.

When I work with someone in pain, post-cancer recovery, or nearing menopause, I don’t just see “a problem.” It’s not only about how years of stress may have trained the nervous system to stay in survival mode, or how nutrition may be influencing inflammation or energy. A holistic perspective also honors how creative passions become medicine for the heart, how physical pursuits build resilience, and how one's spiritual beliefs might be a light through the storm. These are all threads of the same fabric.

Working With the Whole Person

Holistic medicine doesn’t replace western medicine; it complements it. Where western medicine excels, it saves lives. But health isn’t simply the absence of illness; it’s also the ability to live fully, to savor life, and return to what we love. Debilitating injury, surgery, or cancer treatment can leave a person reeling from side effects, loss, or change. Holistic medicine supports the innate capacity to repair, recalibrate, and thrive. It helps the body and mind remember how to function in balance again.

Beyond Symptom Management

Someone living with chronic pain or cancer-related fatigue may already be receiving excellent medical care. Yet they might still feel depleted, anxious, or disconnected from their body. Holistic medicine creates space for that in-between place: the part that isn’t fully addressed by tests or prescriptions. It helps address illness, and also asks:

• How is your body responding to stress?
• What patterns are you repeating out of survival?
• What nourishes you, and what depletes you?
• What losses need to be grieved?
• How are the systems and cultural contexts you live in impacting you?
• What is essential for your quality of life?

The Invitation

Holistic medicine is not about rejecting science or western medicine; it’s about widening the lens.
It honors both data and lived experience, both the measurable and the innumerable. It’s care that meets you where you are: complex, layered, and human, and cultivates the seeds that illness or stress may have depleted.

Ready to reclaim your strength, joy, and vitality? I'd love to take care of you!

Contact Zelena Medicine here.