What is the difference between holistic healing and naturopathy?

After I receive my bachelor's degree at my university, I would like to go into alternative medicine. I am interested in looking at the whole person which includes mind, spirit, and the body. I also would like to help build people's health to prevent diseases, learn about herbs, and teach others about mediation and exercise.

The holistic approach to medicine, simply put, is a way of treating the patient as a whole. In other words, when a patient presents with symptoms of an underlying disease, all aspects of the person's health are considered in the diagnosis and treatment. This means the various physical, psychological, and spiritual processes are considered in the treatment.

Naturopathic medicine is a science based medicine which incorporates the following principles into its philosophy (including a holistic approach).

The Healing Power of Nature
Trust in the body鈥檚 inherent wisdom to heal itself.

Identify and Treat the Causes
Look beyond the symptoms to the underlying cause.

First Do No Harm
Utilize the most natural, least invasive and least toxic therapies.

Doctor as Teacher
Educate patients in the steps to achieving and maintaining health.

Treat the Whole Person
View the body as an integrated whole in all its physical and spiritual dimensions.

Prevention
Focus on overall health, wellness and disease prevention.

In the United States, there are currently 4 accredited colleges of Naturopathic medicine which offer a 4 year course of study ultimately leading to a professional degree of Doctor of Naturopathic medicine.

What you are looking for is to study naturopathy. Holistic healing is treating the body, mind, and spirit all together when treating disease.

It includes nutrition, supplements when necessary, herbal medicines, meditation, massage, aromatherapy, and more. It does not always mean that a patient can just throw away all of their medicine bottles but many times doses can be lowered or medicines stopped completely.

There are naturopaths that practice science-based medicine utilizing all of the above to treat disease. Science based medicine means that everything that they utilize is proven to be effective in regular scientific studies.

It seems that there are quite a few physicians who are very ignorant of what naturopathy is and they are still speaking against it but those who have kept up with the field understand what we do.

As well as learning nutrition, herbal medicine, aromatherapy, and so on I learned 3 years of regular medical school medicine, as required by the licensing board here.

The doctors teaching the regular medical school courses also knew and taught the dietary and environmental causes for many diseases and prevention as well. The only problem is that their patients don't always want to hear it -- they just want you to give them a pill and let them eat and live however they want and be done with it.

It is a pity but many people must be re-educated as to how to view their bodies and their health and realize that many things can be either prevented or ameliorated by proper diet and lifestyle.

Why would you spend all that time and money getting a degree and then go into a field that's simply based on perpetuating a fraud? Naturopathy is load of garbage that claims to improve health by supporting and enhancing the immune system. However, some of the ailments that it claims to treat, such as allergies, are caused by an overactive immune system. Follow the link to read more. Don't waste your time or other people's money with this stuff.

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRela...

get your Dad's money back, you didn't get much of an education.

Holistic is simply a term that is used by alties in general, and is meant for an approach to health that includes mind, body and spirit and encompasses "natural" forms of healing.

Naturopaths are one of many branches of Altmed that claim to be holistic.
They do advocate a lot of very basic common sense things like proper diet and exercise. They also tend to include almost any other type of altmed such as herbs, homeopathy, acupuncture. They do have some unique oddities that define them as quacks, such as beliefs in non diseases like systemic yeast, parasites and the value of purges, enemas and "detoxifying" in general. Some of them us a bizarre technique known as applied kinesiology to "diagnose" various non ailments. Find some YouTube videow on that...they are hilarious