peter@graffiti.UUCP (Peter da Silva) (09/24/85)
There's something I find slightly confusing in all these dicussions on net.med about Holism as opposed to Conventional Medicine. All Holism means is to stand back & look at the whole of a problem. The antonym for Holism isn't Conventional, it's Reductionism. Reductionism means to break the problem up into parts small enough to analyse independently. Everyone uses Holism and Reductionism in solving a problem. In fact once you have the problem broken down into parts you can understand you typically analyse each part Holistically. The size of the parts that you end up with depends on your problem solving ability, your intelligence, the amount of experience you have in the area, and so on. It's generally a good idea to make sure that the parts you end up with are small enough for *you* to understand. Otherwise you're not going to solve the problem. It's also a good idea to make sure that the parts aren't smaller than you can handle. Otherwise you may find that you can't see the forest for the trees. <wry smile at the use of a cliche> Now then, I'm sure that all of you will agree that a computer program is a much less complex object than a human being. Anone who doesn't should start learning more about CS than what they gathered from 2001 and War Games. The accepted method of attacking a programming problem of any given size is modularisation and structured programming. Both of these techniques involve reducing the problem to peices that you can understand... they are reductionist in nature. However when they are used well they aid in the understanding of the program as a whole. I know of no programmer who would claim that they Holistically Understand the system you're using at this very moment, a system that's far far less complex than the simplest patient a Holistic doctor is supposed to treat. Unless you're somehow omniscient, you have to apply reductionistic techniques to understand the patient. Why then do you consider yourself a Holistic Practicioner? Or are you just using "Holistic" as a buzz-word to confuse people into thinking that you have something new, something that generations of GPs haven't been using anyway? Are you selling this decade's "Organic food"? If so, I'll just 'n' past any message with "Holistic" in the title.