The trend in integrative healthcare has been evolving from a patient-centered to a more person-centered holistic approach. In practice, this means engaging the internal resources of the whole person and listening to the needs and responses of the whole person in therapeutic treatment. Although the approach is commendable, there is a distinction to be made that lies in the therapeutic understanding of what constitutes the wholeness of a person.

The holistic paradigm suggests that we are multi-dimensional beings who are not separate from the energies and forces that surround us. We are influenced by those energies and forces in an
individual manner and respond to them in an individual whole person way, both consciously and unconsciously. The integrative approach in medicine, although commendable, nevertheless lies within the framework of the reductionist materialist model in science, a model that lacks the conceptual framework needed to properly investigate such holistic interconnectedness, and thus its tools and methods of research cannot reach the depth and uniqueness of the “whole person’s” disease that is often in need of healing, especially in cases of chronic disease and suffering.
Furthermore, the reductionist materialist model suggests that pathology is the result of cellular changes due to environmental influences, and that disease is the outcome of cumulative cellular damage, often as a result of stress. Within that theory and model, there also lacks a conception
of the highly individual nature of stress, disease, and healing, whose particularities underlie both the individual disease picture and its individual healing process. Although disease may be expressed locally in a cell or an organ or anywhere else in the body, disease does not develop in isolation and
there is no independent “part” that controls its expression. Chronic disease is a whole person state that develops within the dynamic of the individual human being-nature-cosmic relationship, and it is only within that dynamic that there lies the potential for healing.

In summary, the reductionist materialist paradigm is unable toconceptualize the multi-dimensional nature of the human being as it relates to the individual disease process, its expression, and its healing.

“The Whole Person” book advances the anthroposophic paradigm as a fitting philosophical framework that conceptualizes and describes the multi-dimensional being, and the sources and affinities of the different influencing energies and forces, including solar, lunar, and planetary, that are harmonized and expressed in the human being. In the process, it is hoped that we are left with a clear appreciation of the logic of homeopathy and why the laws and principles of homeopathy work, and why classical homeopathy is truly a twenty-first century system of therapeutics that must never be lost to
humanity, for it holds a unique, albeit increasingly threatened place in western medicine due to the overarching reductionist materialist paradigm that dominates medical science.

The “whole person” concept signals even more than a therapeutic ideal in holistic treatment. It also signals an individual’s unique ideal in the journey of life, also referred to as the hero’s journey or the individuation process, that is tasked with the harmonious synthesizing of the energies and forces that both form the embodiment of our individual soul-spirit nature, and through which we are afforded what we individually need to adapt, thrive, and evolve within the fluctuating conditions of the whole self field that informs our material life and existence.
This book should appeal to anyone who is interested in holistic health, anthroposophy, homeopathy, naturopathy, integrative medicine, philosophy, and spirituality.

Buy The Whole Person book by Roberta Vienneau at Amazon https://a.co/d/6Yr5kyS

Roberta Vienneau

Classical Homeopath, Holistic Therapist

RCSHom

CHO

M.A.

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