Here is another way to put things in terms of holistic thinking and practice. In Susun Weed's excellent and weird book on herbal medicine, Healing Wise, she describes herbal medicine as affecting a broader sphere of action, in contrast to Western medicine's focused, laser-like action of its interventions.
Part of this is due to the nature of plant healing itself: though much herbal medicine is still processed - in a minimal way - such as with infusion, decoction, or tincture, you are drawing from a plant's complex biological makeup which contains many different nutrients and elements which tend to work together in the body, affecting multiple systems together, whereas with pharmacology for example you are more often isolating active ingredients and delivering them in a more focused way, which of course have their own complex spheres of action to be sure.
But to give a quick example, targeted diuretics often require coupling with some sort of rehydration regimen, as they deplete the body's potassium supply. Dandelion leaves on the other hand are known to have diuretic properties, while at the same time containing the potassium to replace what is being lost. You can find all sorts of properties such as this in the various medicinal plants.
Not only that, but herbal medicine itself has deep holistic tendencies, carrying strong affinities with other related disciplines such as nutrition and physical movement, spiritual practice, indigenous knowledge and practices, scientific knowledge, and so on.
But of course, Western medicine has within it competing strains of holistic thought of its own. For that matter, we loosely refer to the medical industry as Western medicine, while there have been powerful strains of holistic and even herbal medicine existing within and interacting with industrialized medicine throughout Western history, and the latter regularly influences the former in this context as well. For a better understanding of what holistic scientific thought can really accomplish, I'd recommend the brilliant writings of KLG, who regularly covers these issues far better than I.
The dichotomy we are setting up here though bears more of a relation to the concentration of power than it does to any kind of competing modalities, and the resulting imbalances that result from that concentration. As industrial power continues to concentrate and dominate in modern life, the interests and prerogatives of that power become ever more central to daily life, which increasingly becomes conflated with the notion of "Western" as a result.
The industrial interests and prerogatives are bound up with a way of being in which living systems are separated from their contexts and broken down, their constituent elements separated out and isolated and then re-inserted into artificial useable and tradeable assemblages to produce value. And you constantly hear Western clinicians and researchers complaining that their work is often being shunted within one set of constraints or another, due to outside financial and political pressures, where "following the science" actually means branching steadily out into the areas of inquiry that the facts actually take them, which requires time and energy and resources that various grant constraints, institutions, private actors, and other interests might be gatekeeping.
The sciences are often conflated with industry, as the scale and reach of their advances often make use of the products and advantages of industrial power (and vice versa), but it is industrial power that ultimately threatens the sciences and folk traditions alike (and everything in between) due to its relentless drive to convert everything into value at an ever-increasing and intensifying scale. Alas, I digress, but this is a digression that is increasingly unavoidable.
To go back to herbal and holistic medicine, this is the modality that you find people increasingly seeking out for a regular maintenance of a higher quality of living at lower cost, given the current prerogatives of Western society. You keep ahead on diet, exercise, spiritual practice, and etc. and then hopefully have a high quality source - and the skills and knowledge to field those sources - of targeted herbal intervention for the various aches and pains and bodily dysfunctions and hang-ups that come about in daily life.
I have heard of incredible healings with certain herbal formulations which conventional medicine was unable to address, in the stories of incredible herbalists like Rosemary Gladstar and her peers, for example, but then this is often more esoteric and less mainstream knowledge which though highly regulated in certain surprising ways, is less well-regulated in others, and so there is plenty of grift in this field as well, and folks really need to know what they are doing there to avoid the many pitfalls associated with avoiding conventional industrial medicine altogether. And as a counterpoint, there are plenty of pitfalls lurking in the conventional realm as well.
To build on this point, part of seeking out care in the modern world includes the traversal of a meta-dynamic that is destructive in its own right. You have the world of herbal medicine, typically ignored and disparaged by Western industrial medicine, persist as a collection of practices carried on with descended knowledge and skill, which can produce notions and ideas that can become increasingly vague and obtuse in the wrong hands, and so the grifters descend to mislead and provide inadequate interventions that inevitably harm, and there is a positivist reaction to this harm, and a descending scientism in which the entire herbal enterprise is dismissed wholesale, and then as countless productive avenues are ignored and the positivists strangulate the wide range of avenues for inquiry, people grow dissatisfied and migrate back to the herbal modalities. Rinse and repeat.
It is no accident though that what "Western" medicine does very well is handle emergencies, as Western civilization itself has been typified as a rhythmic lurch from crisis to crisis throughout its history. If you detect cancer for example - hopefully early through regular medical intervention - it is a much more common attitude to say, "OK I'll look at dietary, herbal, and lifestyle options, but first cut this shit out of me, or nuke it, I don't care, get it out of here NOW." You don't mess around with that stuff. And for the most part, that type of intervention has been pretty successful (and has gotten very good), if a little expensive, at least in the US.
The same is the case for various sudden accidents and ruptures such as fractures, impacts, and deep wounds. They can really patch you up in ways that your typical folk practice just can't do. For goodness sake, they can revive people from the brink of death in certain cases.
Western medicine as is it is currently constituted is less strong on addressing chronic illness however, and that is even counting the big issues like cancers and heart disease. I remember an oncologist talking about contemporary cancer research, noting what stunning advances have been made in the field, while at the same time acknowledging that a lion's share of the intervention that commands the most funding is the reactive kind (coupled with advances in early detection), addressing the crisis when it occurs, whereas the prophylactic types of interventions garnered less interest and resources, and then systemic, social and environmental factors were pushed even further back in the queue.
If you go in with complaints about Long Covid, and you don't have any immediately identifiable biomarkers or malfunctioning organs, you're probably just going to get puzzled looks and mumblings about anxiety and sent on your way. This has happened to me personally, and there are countless other anecdotes such as these that are depressingly common in that community.
Indeed, the widespread and destructive consequences of Covid have encouraged a profound shift in certain sectors of Western medicine towards holistic and multi-disciplinary practice - which draw from parallel tracks of holistic, multi-disciplinary thought in the sciences to be sure - for this very reason: that focused, emergency intervention does not work well for complex autoimmune diseases like Long Covid and the like, and there are clinics and practices that specialize in multi-disciplinary and holistic medicine that are popping up everywhere to address this particular weakness.
Part of the problem though is that holistic and multi-disciplinary practice in a resource-intensive (and extractive) field like capital-backed industrialized medicine takes a good helping of social resources that are no longer evenly or justly distributed, so these types of interventions are either more expensive or exclusive, as people find out about these clinics and their patient loads start to back up. You're not going to get services like this through Medicaid, Medicare, or even many conventional insurance plans either.
As I've mentioned about my personal experiences before, it does really help to have conventional medical intervention for those emergencies when something really weird and scary is happening, such as with heart or breathing trouble, which helps to troubleshoot and further isolate the prevailing issue. And then I use these interventions to backstop the more holistic personal practices such as maintaining good diet, exercising, sleeping well, engaging in spiritual practice, pursuing various herb and supplement interventions, and so on.
Left without a whole lot of resources or good options though, personally my instinct is to seek out lower centers of gravity and older, less capital-intensive interventions and lifestyle choices, though those are not without their risks either, to be fair.
