HOLISTIC

Sometimes spelt "Wholistic", this useful word can be put in front of practically any other word in order to radically increase the price of whatever healing it is that you are selling without actually adding any meaning to it whatsoever.

The theory of Holism is that conventional medicine only treats symptoms, without healing the whole person. The fact that without symptoms (such as sneezing, or death) there isn't actually anything wrong with you is usually ignored. Of course, not all symptoms are necessarily apparent, which is why we have such things as X-Ray scanners, but this doesn't matter to holistic therapists, since by claiming to "heal" a person who hasn't got any symptoms they can point to the apparent health of their "patients" as proof that the therapy works. Since most holistic therapies have an entirely subjective method of diagnosis, it is possible to claim that people have something wrong with them that conventional medicine can't detect (such as a Karmic imbalance in the aura or whatever), heal it and then get conventional medicine to confirm that there is nothing wrong.

The idea that holistic therapies only really cure illnesses that don't exist can be confirmed by checking those free listings magazines that turn up everywhere. You will notice that while there are many holistic crystal therapists, colour healers and masseurs, there is a remarkable shortage of people offering holistic dentistry or limb replacement.

There are exceptions to this. In my experience both Osteopathy and Chiropractic can help people with back problems, but only because the practitioners have now abandoned the 19th Century belief that these systems can cure practically anything through treating "lesions", spinal problems invisible to medical science but intuited by the practitioner. Note that both Chiropractic and its offshoot Osteopathy have a completely different list of where these lesions are to be found in the spine and which diseases they cause, and yet people report just about equal benefit from both systems. Homeopathy may well work, but by assisting the immune system rather than by the "like cures like".

Of course, the power of the mind over the body is an established magical principle, and there is little doubt that some people (especially those with psychological problems) can be assisted by any system that they thoroughly believe in (the current no. 1 being Reiki), but there are many self-healing systems that can be learnt for nothing.