It is considered as self evident by all holistic therapists and doctors that an organism can only be healed in its totality. It is not possible to heal an organ separately as if it wasn´t connected to a body. We use to say that we are not treating diseases but sick persons. But the question arises, which wholeness, which totality we are dealing with? Is the individual being a valid whole to be treated meaningfully as separated from his or her surroundings? Or do we have to see an individual – an undividable entitiy, as the term indicates – as interconnected with its relations to other people and to the world? Is it not part of the “totality of symptoms” that we are to collect in our case taking, that he or she is breathing contaminated air all day, that they have to do an alienated work the fruits of which are mainly enjoyed by others and which leaves them in existential insecurity, that their body has to deal constantly with hormons, heavy metals and plastic nano particles that are being injested with water and food all the time? For the individual person of course these are no symptoms in the strict sense of the word but their living conditions to which they react by developing symptoms. But for the next larger holon, for the human society these are certainly symptoms – signs and expressions of a deep and chronic disease. Do we, who are considering it impossible to really heal a stomach without taking the connected person into account, do we seriously believe an indivual could experience a profound healing being part of a morbid society amidst a destroyed environment? Of course we are able to relieve of ailments and to reach some well-being, but a deep and permanent healing will not come about. It is high time to get rid if the delusion there could be individual health within a sick community. Do promote this is part of our responsibility as homeopaths or other holistic pracitioners.
Two hundred years ago the founder of our art, Samual Hahnemann, already wrote in his basic work Organon of Medicine: „He [the homeopath] is likewise a preserver of health if he knows the things that derange health and cause disease, and how to remove them from healthy persons.” Today this is even more true than in his time. Yes, it is part of our tasks to engage ourselves wherever human health is endangered or sacrificed to the profit (as this usually the point) of others. We are not payed to do so as therapists of course, but we should be careful not to confuse our real mission in life the jobs for which we get a financial reward.
The question of the sufficient totality can – in Hahnemann´s words – also be asked as: What is there to be healed? When a person is beaten every day, it would not occur to me to see what is to be healed in their resulting fear, pain and bruises. The morbid human constellation is to be healed first. So we chose the entity that is to be healed one level larger. What occurs as an obstacle to cure or a sickening living condition on the one level, is expression and symptom of a morbid state on the next.

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War und Homeopaths without Borders are models for persons who are engaged beyond their medical employment and try to contribute to a healing of our social environment and thus create conditions for a deep and permanent healing of their patients and of all of us. Even though each individual treatment is a contribution to the health of the whole of our social organism, all those who are thinking and treating holistically can feel called to stay alert and commited on all levels.

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