Wholeness and Health

Changing views of health and healing are presented as being part of a larger change of paradigms, which amounts to a profound cultural transformation. Modern scientific medicine is firmly rooted, both in theory and practice, in the mechanistic, Cartesian paradigm. In spite of the great advances of medical science in our century, the limitations of the mechanistic approach to health are now clearly visible and are manifest in the current health care crisis. At the same time, new holistic and ecological approaches to health and healing are now emerging in theory and in practice. These approaches are synthesized in this article in a new conceptual framework that provides a systems view of health based on the recently developed systems view of life. The new systems view of health is profoundly ecological, and thus in harmony with the Hippocratic tradition which lies at the roots of Western medicine.