[originaltext]Interviewer: I understand you’re interested in holistic medicine

Interviewer:  I understand you’re interested in holistic medicine. Can you explain what holistic medicine is?
Vivienne:  OK. Holistic medicine ... nm ... takes into consideration the whole of the person. Now what this means in... sin most holistic systems is regarding the person as a physical entity, a mental or emotional person, and also even their spiritual side of them. Urn... it also includes looking at the body as a whole rather than looking at individual parts of the body, and as a way of explaining this, we could look at conventional medicine as producing people who are like a cardiologist, who looks at a heart.., um ... a brain specialist, a person who deals with bones.., er... etc. So what we’ve tended to do in conventional medicine is to break things down to a point where we’re actually only looking at one part of the person and we’re not actually relating terribly well that part to the rest of the body, whereas holistic medicine insists that if there is a problem.., er... with your right foot, that is going to somehow.., um... affect your entire body.
Interviewer:  Um ... your speciality is acupuncture.  Er... is that a part of holistic medicine?
Vivienne:  Acupuncture is very much a holistic system. Urn... traditionally the Chinese regarded the person very much as a whole entity and acupuncture itself works on an energy system basically, and in a very simplified way, it’s saying that.., er... you have an energy system within your body and when that energy becomes blocked or tainted in some way, then you will manifest certain symptoms and the things that we look at in conventional medicine as things like arthritis or rheumatism are, to the Chinese, merely an imbalance of the energy. So in this way, they may say to you, well, yes, you have rheumatoid arthritis but we’re going to actually look at your energy balance and rebalance you, and as a result, your symptoms should disappear.
Interviewer: Urn... is acupuncture essentially a form of preventative medicine?
Vivienne:  Traditionally, it was, very much. Um... in fact, traditionally.., in China, people only used to pay the doctor while they were well and they used to go to their doctor fairly regularly on, you know, maybe four or five times a year, and they would only pay the doctor when they were kept well. And if they got sick, they didn’t pay the doctor. And the doctor had various methods of which acupuncture was one, diet was another, exercise was another.., er... of ensuring that the person lived a right life style and their emphasis was on if you’re living a right life style, if you’re living in tune with the laws of the universe, going to sleep when it’s dark, waking up when it’s light, working, resting, doing all these things properly, then you won’t get sick. Unfortunately, our way of looking at life in the West is very different in that we tend to struggle on in spite of our headache and not take terrii~ly much notice of our body when things are not quite fight and we tend to struggle on until we fall over and we get carted off to hospital in an ambulance. And so, acupuncture in the West, unfortunately in a way has come to be not the preventative medicine that it could be because we’re not taking responsibility enough for ourselves in going along and making sure that we stay well.