Holistic Medicine for Animals

with notes on reductionism

Holistic, Alternative, Natural or Complementary?

The Holistic vet

The word holistic has been mentioned a great deal on this site and you are bound to encounter it elsewhere. Not everyone understands what it means and not everyone who would purport to be using holistic medicine really is doing so. Holism involves treating the body as a whole, including the mind and spirit and including a study of the diet, the lifestyle, the environment in which that body operates and the two-way interaction between the body and its environment. The holistic vet must do this, to fit the description.

Jan Smuts (1870 - 1950) is credited with coining the term 'holism'

Nature tends to form systems. In any system, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The whole is not entirely explicable in terms of its parts. Each system has others within it. Within each system, each part interacts with every other part and is, in turn, acted upon by each other part. No part can be independent of the others and no part can be independent of the whole. Each part is unique, and cannot be compared with another, yet is essential to the functioning of the whole.

Each system in turn interacts with every other system. No system is independent of any other. Some may hear echoes of De Morgan’s parody of Jonathan Swift’s eloquent and elegant observation on fleas:

“Big fleas have little fleas
Upon their back to bite 'em
And little fleas have lesser fleas
And so ad infinitum.”

All things are connected, as in Seathl’s words, whence came the Gaia Theory of our earth as a living organism.

Because holism knows no boundaries, we need to define a context, before we can communicate and discuss any ‘system’. In holistic veterinary medicine, we are referring to the animal patient 'system'. We must then look both inwards and outwards, from our visual image of the animal, in order to understand the meaning of this system.

Looking outwards, we find that the animal operates within his environment and cannot be independent of it. Each part of his environment acts upon him and he, in turn, acts upon it. He cannot usefully be considered outside this context. This explains why an animal may appear differently in a veterinary consulting room than at home and why he may appear to be ‘cured’ in hospital, for example, but not when sent home. The environments are wholly different and exert massive effects. This is also a possible explanation for one aspect of the scientific failure of laboratory animal experimentation. For any given patient, we must observe how his environment and lifestyle play a part in his disease and in his health. In a horse’s case, for instance, this necessarily includes saddling, shoeing, stabling, feeding, riding etc.

Looking inwards, we find each part of the animal interacts (two-way) with every other part and that no part is independent of any other, nor of the whole. This means that we cannot usefully consider one part of the animal in isolation. Although an organ has an existence and can be removed from the body and viewed in isolation, there is no such independent functional entity. As ‘specialisms’ develop in human and animal medicine, so there is a tendency for the patient to be broken down into more and more 'separate' components (reductionism - see below), with a tendency to ignore the other parts of the body. This can lead to great misunderstandings of the body, because it is not a machine. The patient is a living entity, following the laws of holistic nature. The individual components have no independent function and no meaning, without the others and without the whole.

For this reason, Homeopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine (including Acupuncture), Herbal Medicine (herbs) and some other systems of natural medicine, which consider the body as a functional whole, within its environment, are often able to produce results, when a more conventional and 'reductionist' approach has failed.

Christopher Day, practising at the Alternative Veterinary Medicine Centre, is a holistic vet of 35 years experience in holistic medicine, especially homeopathy and is willing to share experiences, understanding and ideas with veterinary colleagues, veterinary students and animal owners. The AVMC was the first dedicated holistic veterinary practice in the UK, founded in 1987.

N.B. Many of the therapies are restricted to use by a fully-qualified veterinary surgeon (Veterinary Surgeons Act 1966). On this site, each page describing a therapy has a note, explaining this.

Reductionism

Reductionism has been explained as: a doctrine that maintains that all objects and events, their properties and our experience and knowledge of them are made up of ultimate elements, indivisible parts (Ackoff 1974).

Perhaps the 17th century French philosopher René Descartes (1596 - 1650) can be credited with the basis for this reductionist and mechanistic approach to the world and to living beings. However, it is not all down to him. The human brain appears to find it easier to think along mechanistic lines, rather than holistic lines. There is a desire to classify everything and to explain everything mechanistically. There is a fear of the wider and less explicable. Reductionism is fundamentally opposite to the holistic way of thinking, in so many areas and has given rise to much of modern science.

Descartes formally declared that the mind was separate from the body. He attempted to apply certainty to philosophy and biology. His life was therefore close to being an oxymoron, in itself (it appears clear, in my work, that the only certainty is uncertainty - Chris Day). In Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1625-28), he laid down the elements of 'rational analysis' which, combined with experiment and observation, became the basis of modern scientific method. In De Homine, he held that animals could be reductively explained as automata.

Holistic, Alternative, Natural or Complementary?

The Holistic Vet

http://www.veterinary-holistic.co.uk 

Copyright © AVMC - April 2007

Associated websites: http://chris-day.blogware.com/ - www.holistic-vet.co.uk - www.veterinary-holistic.co.uk -  www.alternativeveterinarymedicine.co.uk - www.alternativeveterinarymedicinecentre.co.uk - www.avmc.co.uk - www.naturalfeeding.co.uk - www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~avmc - www.chinhampublications.co.uk - www.any-uk-vet.co.uk/day - http://vetontheweb.co.uk/vet-directory-detail.asp?id=3946 - http://www.vetclick.com/referral-practices/view_detail.php?PracticeId=2508&ReferralId=1

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