What holistic health actually means

Editor’s note. The first piece in this journal is not an essay. It is a short conversation between two practitioners already in this guide — one trained as a nurse practitioner, one practicing frequency medicine — about a single question: what does holistic care actually mean? We are publishing it as is, because the answer is the kind of plain-spoken middle ground this guide exists to surface.

The middle ground, in her own words

Asked what “holistic-minded” means to her, Becca Boice does not start with a manifesto. She starts with the word balance.

“There is definitely a need for true Western medicine. But there’s also the need for supporting one’s body with natural, holistic remedies — whole foods, resources on how to not overwhelm yourself with I need to remove every toxin from my child’s life. It’s more just a balance. You need to have a very good balance.”

That sentence is the whole frame. It is the kind of sentence a nurse practitioner can say without losing either audience — the parent who is afraid of pharma, and the parent who is afraid of being told pharma is the enemy. Most of the loudest voices in this category pick one of those audiences and abandon the other. Becca refuses to.

What that looks like in practice

The work she and her co-founder are building at Building Blocks for Life is, in her telling, a resource hub: how to cook healthy meals for your children, what to try before you try a prescription, what natural approaches are worth knowing about before going, as she puts it, “for gusto and doing all the doctor-prescribed things.”

“We’re just trying to be one resource hub that people can go to and say, oh, this is a better remedy than just trying something that the doctor told me to do.”

It is worth noticing what she is not saying. She is not saying the doctor is wrong. She is not saying prescriptions are the enemy. She is saying: try the gentler thing first, when the gentler thing is real, and know the difference. That is the post-conventional register this guide is built to publish.

Why this conversation, in this room

The conversation was hosted by Stephanie Tornatore, who runs The Frequency Solution out of Monroe, Connecticut, and whose own work sits even further from the prescription pad. Two practitioners in the same network, with two different modalities, having one conversation about what the middle looks like. That is the editorial unit we are going to publish in here, again and again.

— The editors