The word holistic is used frequently these days - but what does it really mean? Holistic medicine seeks to get to the root cause of a health problem. We are all complicated and unique beings, what is 'normal' for one person is not at all right for another, that is why holistic medicine treats each person as an individual.

In searching for the root cause of a problem, the practitioner will need to take a very detailed case history, which will ask about every aspect of the patient's health and lifestyle. This is important to place the current problem into its proper context.

We do not simply treat the symptoms, we treat the cause.

Treating the symptoms is the equivalent of placing a bucket under a leaking roof. Yes, it will help to protect the furniture and carpets in the short term, and it may allow us to carry on and have a reasonable night's sleep so that we can deal with the problem in the morning. However, problems arise when we ignore the underlying problem and just keep on emptying the bucket and putting it back under the leak. In this analogy the leak will, of course, continue to get worse and eventually there will be serious structural problems with the house.

So we see that simply suppressing symptoms will prevent us from dealing with the underlying cause, allowing the problem to worsen.

Holistic medicine helps us to understand why our health imbalance has developed in the first place. By understanding how our condition can be influenced by lifestyle, emotional and spiritual factors, we are empowered to proactively seek good health once more.

This is why if you ask a holistic herbal practitioner something like 'Can you tell me which herbs I should take for a headache?' you will not get a quick and simple answer. Every case of head ache is unique and in order to treat it more effectively the individual case should be examined. A holistic herbalist will use carefully blended individual herbal prescriptions.