Holistic health in Tucson at Caritas - Find what works best for you
Holistic health is such a broad term. Here at Caritas Center for Healing in Tucson, we begin with a straightforward way of thinking about it. Then we can talk about how to practice it. Three little words:
- Mind
- Body
- Spirit
They form together into a “whole-istic” picture of the individual. They work together to create a healthy “you.” Holistic health addresses mind, body, and spirit. Spirit means your enthusiasm for life that arises from your deepest inner reaches; or spirituality, the practice of expanding and rejuvenating the spirit.
Ask a holistic health practitioner if the body can be treated separately from mind and spirit, and the answer is likely to be “yes, but if the root cause of symptoms in the body are in the mind or spirit, they must be treated together.” Otherwise, the symptoms are likely to resist treatment. Doesn’t matter how many acupuncture sessions you book or yoga classes you take, you must treat the whole person.
Ask an allopathic physician the same question and–if they subscribe to the dominant paradigm in Western medicine-they’re likely to say that the body can be influenced by other aspects, but acknowledge that they are trained primarily in treating the body as its own unit and to intervene primarily with pharmaceutical agents or surgical procedures. Increasingly, thanks to the influence of a grassroots movement, increasing scientific evidence, and leading voices like Dr. Deepak Chopra, and Tucson’s own Dr. Andrew Weil, there are programs such as University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine that offer training to M.D.s in more holistic approaches. Additionally, more and more physicians are familiar with and more open to a broader variety of treatments even if they were not trained in them.
Fortunately, plenty of evidence is accumulating to convince at least some members of the evidence-based (allopathic) medical community of the efficacy of the holistic and integrative medical approaches.
Listening to the Body: Somatic Metaphor and Clinical Somatics
What if the medical symptoms a person experiences fall outside of the standard model for cause-and-effect? For one, it means that traditional treatments will not help them as much as they should and are unlikely to address the root issue or source. For these symptoms and issues, the source is sometimes found in how the body expresses a problem that ultimately connects to the mind, emotions, and/or spirit.