A Shift to Holistic Medicine?
Bodies are not organic machines. A machine’s parts don’t know or respond to the whole. Your car’s radiator isn’t aware of the battery’s charge, and the engine doesn’t self-organise or adapt—repairs and upgrades are imposed from the outside. In contrast, the human body is a self-organising, self-regulating, and self-healing system. Its parts are not fixed or interchangeable components, but dynamic participants in a living whole.
Consider neuroplasticity: the brain's ability to rewire itself following injury. In cases of hydrocephalus (water on the brain), for instance, individuals can lose significant portions of brain tissue and still function remarkably well. Adults with only 1cm of brain tissue can have normal lives—evidence of the brain adapting to a radically changed internal environment. Or take stem cells produced in bone marrow; these cells can transform into any tissue the body needs, migrating to sites of damage to repair tissues or replenish blood. There are limits to plasticity but even so, we need to take note of its existence.
Even at the genetic level, bodies are flexible. Epigenetics has shown us that gene expression can be turned on or off based on environmental signals. As Dr. Bruce Lipton puts it, “Genes are not destiny. Environmental influences, including nutrition, stress and emotions, can modify those genes.” The body is always in conversation with its environment—listening, adapting, evolving.
Despite this innate sophistication, our culture clings to the metaphor of the body as machine, often as a vehicle for the brain (the "pilot in the cockpit") and this view informs much of modern medicine.
We see this mindset in the surgical replacement of joints, the injection of “missing” substances, or the removal of malfunctioning tissues. These interventions can help, of course—but only up to a point. When we intervene mechanically in a biological system, we disrupt its subtle web of self-regulation. This often manifests as what we euphemistically call “side effects”—not side effects at all, but direct effects of treating the body like a machine.
Cutting out problematic tissue does not address why the tissue became problematic in the first place. Supplementing with a single compound ignores why that compound was low and whether raising it will upset other more important chemical balances. The body responds not passively but actively: it adjusts, resists, and reshapes itself in response to interventions.
As bodyworkers, we have the privilege—and responsibility—of approaching the body as it truly is—intelligent, responsive, and whole. Rather than forcing change from the outside, we support the body’s own capacity to adapt and heal from within. This approach has its place and limitations. Ideally, bodywork would sit within a wider medical framework that is also holistic in its approach.
There are signs of modern medicine beginning to shift this way. What is now called ‘functional medicine’ is a systems-based approach to health that focuses on identifying and addressing the root causes of disease rather than just treating symptoms. It blends the best of conventional medicine with integrative and lifestyle-based approaches, often drawing from fields like nutrition, genetics, endocrinology, psychology, and gut health.
The core idea is that the body is an interconnected dynamically self-adjusting system. As such, doctors of functional medicine would likely form productive collaborations with therapeutic bodyworkers. So far the UK’s NHS only has a tiny number of qualified doctors working in functional medicine (Google says “several”), but a shift is a shift…
