Are holistic therapies pseudosciences?
Many people claim that holistic therapies are pseudosciences.
But what does it mean?
From the Greek pseudo, which means "false", "lie" or "not true".
The suffix pseudo, whenever it precedes a word, gives the meaning of something that is not true, that is misleading or fraudulent.
That is, pseudosciences are false sciences.
But are holistic therapies really pseudosciences?
We must first understand what holistic therapy is.
In wikipedia the term therapy means:
Treatment for a particular disease.
And what is a treatment?
According to the same wikipedia, treatment is the set of means of any kind whose purpose is the cure or relief of illnesses or symptoms.
And what is holistic or holism?
From the Greek holos, it means "whole" or "all", also called Non Reductionism.
That is, in holistic therapies there are no specializations such as neurologists, cardiologists, dentists, etc., but techniques developed considering the human being as an individual who although has different systems (physical body, mental body, emotional body, chakras, aura, etc.), they all relate and interact with each other.
But in the end, holistic therapies are pseudosciences?
To answer this question we must make two differentiations:
Science and consciousness
According to wikipedia science is:
From the Latin scientia, translated "knowledge".
Refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. Strictly speaking, science refers to the system of acquiring knowledge based on the scientific method as well as to the organized body of knowledge obtained through such research.
We see that the scientific method is fundamental in science.
The scientific method refers to a cluster of basic rules of the procedures that produce scientific knowledge, whether new knowledge, either a correction (evolution) or an increase in the area of incidence of the previous existing knowledge.
On the other hand, consciousness or conscience is a quality of the mind, considering that it encompasses qualifications such as subjectivity, self-awareness, wisdom, and the ability to perceive the relationship between one another and an environment. It is a widely researched subject in philosophy of mind, psychology, neurology and cognitive science.
Some philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness, which is the experience itself, and access consciousness, which is the processing of the things we experience during the experience.
Phenomenal consciousness is the state of being aware, just as when we say "I am aware" and access consciousness refers to being aware of something, such as when we say "I am aware of these words".
Consciousness is a psychic quality, that is, it belongs to the sphere of the human psyche, so it is also said to be an attribute of the spirit, mind, or human thought. Being conscious is not exactly the same thing as perceiving yourself in the world, but being in the world and belong to the world, for this, intuition, deduction and induction take part.
For this reason, if you are looking from a scientific point of view, holistic therapies are in fact pseudosciences. However, from a consciousness point of view, holistic therapies are a set of techniques and practices that provide a healing experience in the human psyche.
The wikipedia makes the following mention of pseudosciences or Pseudomedicine:
Acupuncture
Aromatherapy
Chromotherapy
Homeopathy
Naturopathy
Parapsychology
Reflexology
Reiki
Therapeutic touch
Vacuum therapy
Among many others.
On the other hand, on the same page of the wikipedia research, another category appears that apparently wasn't that disparaged, which is traditional medicine:
Apitherapy
Ayurveda
Herbalism
Shamanism
Among others.
And it also mentions that traditional medicine is the set of health practices developed before what is classified as modern (or conventional) medicine.
In these practices, the healer used his her psyche to identify the treatments to be used with the intention of curing a person's illness.
Subsequently, this type of treatment was tested with the scientific method, where some were approved and many others were disapproved.
When I mention approved or disapproved treatments, I am referring exclusively to the label that the scientific method gave them, which does not mean that in the face of the consciousness, a disapproved treatment by the scientific method does not fulfill its healing function, because as previously specified, science and conscientiousness are two completely different paths.
The scientific method rigorously tests objective reality, while consciousness experiences subjective reality. Both realities are an important and inherent part of the human being.
Our society has gone through a process of Westernization.
Westernization is a process through which non-Western societies fall under the influence of Western culture (European civilization) on issues such as industry, technology, law, politics, economics, lifestyle, diet, language, religion or Western values.
In our Westernized society we consider objective reality to be superior to subjective reality and we have the impression, even unconsciously, that those motivated by subjective reality are foolish or have a lower IQ, when in fact both are an important and inherent part of the human being.
I believe that for this reason, many holistic therapists feel pressured to try to convince Westernized society about the effectiveness of their techniques and try to explain them using the language of scientists. Affirmations like quantum physics have shown that meditating heals, that reiki energy is measurable by E=mc², creating doctorates in miracle courses, etc.
Trying to fit a method of subjective reality into the methods of objective reality will not make us more or less accepted in our Westernized society, going so far as to incur serious failures when some claim that it is possible to replace medical treatments with holistic therapies. With this, we only can be the reason for many jokes and criticisms, or even worse, we can apply to lawsuits for discouraging people from not following their medical treatments.
What is the role of a holistic therapist?
The holistic therapist is an individual who uses a set of techniques and practices, considering the human being as the integration of several systems and whose purpose is the cure or relief of illnesses or symptoms.
These integrative techniques and practices do not use the scientific method, but the psyche inherent to the human being, where it is possible to identify the treatments to be used with the intention of curing a person's illness.
Understanding that holistic treatments are part of a subjective reality, and that the fact of not follow the standards of our Westernized society, that is, the fact of not belong to the objective reality, does not mean that we will not be able to achieve our goals. On the contrary, we achieve our goals in indecipherable ways for the science, which had never been able to understand our processes because those processes are part of what we call spirit, which is not the object of study of science.
What is NOT the role of a holistic therapist?
A holistic therapist is not a doctor, under no circumstances we can say that our treatments replace medicine. There is a law that criminalizes these practices in Brazil. I guess similar laws are regulating this in other countries:
"Quackery is a crime constituted in Chapter III - Crimes Against Public Health - Crimes Against Public Incolumity, after the crimes of illegal exercise of medicine, dental or pharmaceutical art and Charlatanism"
We have a duty to clarify that our treatments are complementary to medicine. The patient must strictly follow medical treatment before choosing to complement this treatment with our techniques.
We are not scientists. Taking scientific research or scientific terminology to the field of subjective reality is inappropriate. The result of a scientific research is unalterable unless new scientific research is carried out on the previous one. We cannot use the conclusion of a scientific research to try to define in our own words that our techniques have been proven.
The purpose of this video was to assertively clarify what holistic therapies are and motivate therapists to continue their work with a lot of professionalism, feeling proud of their work that although it is not part of the acceptable standards of westernized society, our work fulfills an important function in the balance of the human psyche where through the experimentation of our subjective reality, we can fill the voids that studies of objective reality cannot fill in the human being.
