The Five Pillars of Holistic Medicine
At Nashville Integrated Medicine we focus a considerable amount of attention on what we call the Five Pillars. They are as follows:
- Nutrition/Diet
- Movement/Exercise
- Sleep
- Emotional Stress
- Meaning/Connectedness/Purpose
These are the essential building blocks of our health, the “pillars” that uphold the integrity of our well-being. A helpful analogy is that of baking a cake. These five essentials are the cake; all that we use in both western and alternative medicine – the drugs, surgery, herbs, vitamins, alternative techniques – are the icing. If you are baking a cake and the core ingredients are not good, the cake is lousy and no amount of icing will fix that. On the other hand, when you have a really great tasting cake based on tasty, well-prepared ingredients, you really don’t need a lot of icing, it’s mostly great on its own.
Likewise, attention to improving these Five Pillars into optimal condition fixes a lot of things. Many health difficulties are completely remedied, and those that aren’t are rendered much less symptomatic so that far fewer therapeutic interventions are required for management. For example, the person suffering from a condition such as diabetes or asthma needs much less of standard medications or even herbal and vitamin-oriented support if the real energy and focus is on substantial improvement in these five critical elements. Conversely, if these aren’t optimized, boatloads of drugs and supplements will be needed just to keep one’s head above water.
For these reasons, we will spend a lot of time with you delving deeply into these aspects and where they might need attention. We will investigate each in detail, looking for hidden barriers and problems that may not always be readily apparent. We also employ the most up-to-date and useful of the alternative and standard medicinal approaches to help you with your health conditions, but without attention to the cake, those doses of “icing” will have very diminished effect.