Holistic medicine, a doctrine of preventive and therapeutic medicine that emphasizes the
necessity of looking at the whole person—his body, mind, emotions, and environment—rather
than at an isolated function or organ and which promotes the use of a wide range of health
practices and therapies. It has especially come to stress responsibility for “self-healing,” or
“self-care,” by observing the traditional commonsense essentials of exercise, healthful diet,
adequate sleep, good air, moderation in personal habits, and so forth.Alternative medicine is any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine, butwhich lacks biological plausibility and is untested or proven ineffective. Complementarymedicine (CM), complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), integrated medicine or integrative medicine (IM), and holistic medicine are among many rebrandings that describe various ways alternative medicine is combined with mainstream medicine. Alternative therapies share in common that they reside outside of medical science and instead rely on pseudoscience.