Overview
“Holistic” means a consideration of all aspects of a situation or circumstance. In college applications, “holistic review” refers to an admissions review process that considers every aspect of a student’s profile like extracurricular activities and personal struggles rather than just their test scores and GPA. In healthcare, “holistic care” refers to an approach that considers every aspect of someone’s health (often through biopsychosocial approaches), so that something like clinical depression is addressed through a consideration of diet, exercise, medication, social networks, financial stability, purposeful living, and other dimensions that influence health. Recovery capital frameworks take a holistic perspective when addressing substance use disorders to monitor whether someone has access to community support beyond whatever coping skills they might learn in a long-term treatment or rehabilitation program. Although “holistic” isn’t a specific medical or legal term, the medical community acknowledges “integrative medicine” which essentially covers the same concepts.
At the same time, “holistic” can very easily be used as a marketing buzzword in the alternative health and wellness industry, especially when marketing products or services that lack evidence. The argument from these sellers tends to be that “Western” biomedical institutions only study surgical and pharmaceutical interventions that are profitable for parties in the private sector, so there’s no incentive to study other “holistic” approaches. I certainly think there’s a lot of merit to this argument, and an entire field called metascience exists to critically exmaine the way science is done, but that doesn’t automatically mean a particular product should be trusted.