Holistic medicine is “human” medicine

Advancements in medicine and technology over the past 300 years have given us an insight into the intricate cellular and mechanical complexities of the human body. Science has seemingly explained a world far apart from ancient systems of thought where magic, religion, emotion, and medicine were undifferentiated.

The material and mechanistic view of the human body that developed led to the separation of the spiritual and emotional dimensions from the physical body. The human body became treated as some kind of frozen anatomical structure, a “biochemical machine” that somehow learnt to think, and the epiphenomenon we call consciousness was thought to be produced through the “dance of atoms”— thought was believed to be the byproduct of matter.1 Such a materialistic view has been controversially expressed by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: “What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child.”