Читать книгу Contemporary Health Studies - Louise Warwick-Booth - Страница 42

The contrasting medical and social models are not the only way to conceptualize health. Another way of looking at health is by taking a ‘holistic’ view, which takes a more integrated approach (Chronin de Chavez et al., 2005). Essentially holistic health is ‘an expression of wholeness’ (Svalastog et al., 2017: 431). This takes into account the interaction of biological, psychological and social factors (Earle, 2007a) and also views the person as a ‘whole’ rather than a sum of their ‘parts’. Holistic notions of health may be seen as taking into account mind, body and spirit (see Patterson, 1997 – in Earle, 2007a). The difference between the social model and a holistic approach to health is that the holistic approach tends to focus on the individual rather than social structures that influence the individual (Chronin de Chavez et al., 2005 and Earle, 2007a). A holistic approach underpins many complementary (or so called ‘alternative’) approaches to health. While a strength of a holistic approach is that it takes spiritual health into consideration, one of the criticisms of holistic approaches to health is that, similarly to the medical model, it is more individualistic and does not take wider social factors into account.