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You know how taking a walk isn’t just good for your muscles and heart? Moving by foot also reduces stress and helps you sleep. Better sleep, in turn, is good for your heart and mood. But in order to walk, you need to have a safe place to do so. The air you breathe outside needs to be clean, too. The point isn’t actually about walking, but showing how interconnected our bodies are and how they interact with social and environmental determinants of health. And when you take a step back for that 10,000-foot view, you start to understand the idea of whole person health.
It can also apply to an individual, family units, a community, and the population at large, per the NCCIH.
While whole person health is beginning to become a focus of conventional medicine, it has philosophical roots in traditional medical systems around the world, such as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and ayurveda. TCM is a 5,000-year-old system that uses practices like acupuncture or herbal medicine with the goal of balancing the body to promote mental and physical health, per the Northwestern Medicine Osher Center for Integrative Health. Ayurveda comes from India, and it’s one of the world’s oldest healthcare systems, focusing on how diet, exercise, and lifestyle affect physical and mental well-being, notes the NCCIH. So, as you can see, the belief that every system in the body is interconnected — including your emotional and spiritual self — is nothing new, but it may feel like it is in Western applications.
Though conventional (or Western) medicine is the mainstay of treatment in the United States, we’re slowly catching up to a whole health approach. Thanks to large studies, like the Framingham Heart Study and Nurses’ Health Study, researchers understand that a variety of factors influence one’s health status and can play a role in disease prevention and treatment, according to the NCCIH. That said, more research is needed to understand how all of these pieces fit together and how whole person health can best be used within the healthcare system.
Currently, the NCCIH is expanding their definition of integrative health to include whole person health, according to their 2021–2025 strategic plan. “Growing health burdens are loudly telling us that we must think about health in a different way to chart much-needed progress,” wrote Helene M. Langevin, MD, the director of the NCCIH in a 2021 editorial regarding the need for the strategic plan. Forthcoming research will also need to identify how the built environment (like access to sidewalks and bike paths) influences physical activity levels or how green spaces can be used for stress management, Dr. Langevin notes.
That said, this approach to care is already being utilized in an impactful way, such as via the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease, the NCCIH notes.
“Whole person wellness is a holistic approach to achieving and maintaining optimal well-being, which includes the whole person — this mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual being,” says Rachel Dew, PhD, doctor of natural medicine, an integrative life coach and founder of the Integrative Wellness Academy in Los Angeles. “Each of these elements contribute to health,” she says.
Often, we think of health as a set of behaviors you do — but it’s so much more than that. “Your physical system is where the results show up. However, you can eat clean and have optimal perceived health in the body, but if you have stuck negative emotions, traumas, or chronic stress, that will permeate into every major area of your life, leading to imbalances and disruptions that affect your health,” Dr. Dew explains. In other words, you can think of the main areas like a scale — when one thing is off, everything else is affected.
“This idea of whole person well being is very much a patient-centered, individually empowered perspective. This is something that [conventional] medical systems don’t address,” says Dew. She notes general frustration at medical models that treat disease or symptoms themselves but don’t focus on the root cause of illness. Whole person health looks at a variety of contributors to put the best plan in place to care for your all-around health.
Humans are dynamic, and treatment often requires more than a medicine to “fix” a problem. “It’s important to take care of patients as a whole — we don’t separate the illness from the individual,” says William Dempsey, MD, a deputy chief medical officer of The Wright Center for Community Health, and the medical director of The Wright Center’s Clarks Summit Practice in Pennsylvania.
When you, as a patient, are regarded as a whole person (and not just seen as someone with diabetes or acid reflux, for instance), you may expect the following benefits:
Whole person health is not used in lieu of biomedical medical practice. “If someone has illness or disease, a whole person approach should be integrated alongside [conventional] Western medicine,” says Dew. The two, she says, can mesh “beautifully.” Why? You’d address both what’s making you feel unwell now as well as why it’s occurring — and how to incorporate prevention to stay well in the future.
One of the issues, however, is that this all-around health focus may not be incorporated into your existing medical care, and access can be a problem. For example, if you have a clogged artery, surgery can potentially save your life. But, if you receive surgery and don’t change your lifestyle and address mental and emotional well-being to regulate stress, your heart may suffer again, says Dew.
“Life is both rainbows and thunderstorms. The key is that you need to remain vertical during a thunderstorm, even though rain, wind, and hail may be strong and overwhelming,” Dr. Dempsey says. So you have to ask yourself the question: What are the anchors that keep me from getting knocked down during a thunderstorm? He says that he talks to his patients about physical behaviors (such as taking daily walks to promote cardiovascular strength) to emotional tactics (using de-stressing strategies, such as deep breathing), intellectual pursuits (what do you do to make yourself smarter every day), and spiritual anchors (this could be a religious belief or something that meaningfully connects you with something bigger than yourself, per the University of Minnesota Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing’s definition of spirituality).
Having all of these in place in good times can help you weather the bad when stress takes over, whether that’s divorce from your partner, death in the family, or a cancer diagnosis for you or a loved one, says Dempsey. One example of how your physical health intersects with these other pillars? He points to research on COVID-19 that found that people who had a recent mental disorder diagnosis, including depression, had an increased risk for contracting COVID-19 and were almost twice as likely to die of the disease. (This link was especially prevalent for African Americans and women.)
As Langevin writes in her editorial, more than one-quarter of Americans have more than one chronic condition, but it’s not logical to view each chronic condition as a thing on its own; they not only interact with each other but they also drive “other health burdens, such as chronic pain, chronic stress, depression, opioid addiction, and suicide.”
In a narrative review that analyzed 125 studies, “whole-person models of primary care … routinely report substantial benefits for improving the patient experience, clinical outcomes and in reducing costs,” making this a win-win for patients, providers, and healthcare companies. The authors point to one study from the University of Arizona Integrative Health Center, an adult primary care clinic that combines elements like nutrition, mind-body medicine, health coaching, acupuncture, and more, which found that patients noted improved sleep, were less fatigued, had less pain, ate more veggies, and got more exercise in the program.
Integrative health coaching incorporates the principles of whole person health wherein professionals help people change their behavior in service of their health goals. This includes one of the most pursued health and wellness areas in the U.S.: weight loss — a journey that can be frustrating for many.
However, a whole person health approach may help patients reframe their struggles with weight loss to possibly achieve results in a more positive, more effective way. For example, the narrative review cited above points to another study with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center health plan members that found that after 180 days of health coaching, 44 percent lost five percent or more of their body weight — a benefit that was likely because they reported increasing physical activity, eating more nutritious foods, and reducing stress.
