Holistic Therapy

I've been reading this book on acupuncture, and it really does an amazing job of describing what is meant by Holistic Therapy, its purpose, and how it works. The book is called "Is Acupuncture Right for You? What It Is, Why It Works, and How It Can Help You" and is written by Ruth Lever Kidson.
The underlying principle of much of alternative health care is Holism - "the treatment of the patient as a whole".
Examples of nonholistic treatments include surgery and the use of drugs. Surgery is "based on the principle that if a part of the patient is diseased, that part is removed." This flies in the face of Holistic Therapy. The same is true of prescription drugs. They are meant to target one or two specific ailments, without taking into account the rest of the patient. This is one reason why drugs so often have side effects - because they disrupt parts of the patient that were not taken into account by the doctor, and also because the drugs were not designed to be beneficial to the entire body. Antibiotics are not holistic in nature. While they may kill harmful bacteria, they also kill the friendly flora present in the digestive tract which is crucial to digestion.
Holism is really why homeopathic remedies are so different from over-the-counter drugs. Homeopathic medicines are meant to take into account all aspects of a patient - their temperament, their eating habits, etc., rather than just the symptoms they are experiencing. By looking at all these aspects, a homeopathic can be prescribed that will resolve the underlying cause of the symptoms.
Western Medicine makes a diagnosis which describes "the end result of the disease process" rather than looking at causes. It is very specific to the part of the body which is showing disease, but leaves out the rest. We can look at the names of certain diagnoses and see evidence of this approach - "heart attack, gallbladder disease, kidney stones, varicose veins, slipped disk" etc.
Acupuncture is a holistic therapy - it doesn't just focus on the manifestation of a disease. (example - "heart disease does not mean there is a problem heart in an otherwise healthy body") They look at the disease manifestation and, taking into account many other aspects of the patient, trace the cause from that.