The Web of Care: A Holistic Health Worth Fighting For

Part Two of 'Reclaiming Holistic Health from the Wellness Grift'

photo by Walt Kent

(read Part One here)

Imagine a net—woven from many strands, each connected, each reinforcing the others. A net doesn’t depend on a single thread to bear the strain; its strength lies in the way its fibers interlace, distributing force across the whole structure. The more points of connection it has, the more resilient it becomes. The more the effort is spread across the web, the easier it becomes to shift whatever it has a hold on.

Now picture that net wrapped around something settled in, something resistant to being moved. If you tried to move that thing with a lone rope, fastened to a single point, it might snap under the strain. But when the net pulls from multiple angles at once, each thread contributing, the weight begins to shift. No single strand carries the burden alone; it is the net itself that makes movement possible.

This is how holistic interventions work. In an interconnected system, every function both depends on and influences many others. In the human body, supporting digestion affects immune function. Regulating stress impacts inflammation. Improving circulation enhances tissue repair. Each part of a well-designed holistic protocol—herbs, nutrition, movement, sleep, emotional support—acts like a strand in that net, gripping the whole from different angles, working together to create real movement.

A fragile system relies on a single thread. A resilient one is woven from many. The goal isn’t to pull harder—it’s to weave wisely, creating the conditions for movement to flow with ease.

Any analogy has its limits—health patterns aren’t fixed structures but dynamic networks in constant motion. The bodymind is always adapting, and healing isn’t just about triggering change but about how that change integrates, shifting the system toward deeper resilience. We often don’t even trigger change but support a process already underway. Rather than applying external pressure, holistic change works within an already self-organizing system, helping movement cohere.

Despite its limitations, I often return to this image of a net—when crafting remedies and recommendations for an herbal client, when tending to the life in my garden, or when working within an organization to improve communication and power-sharing. The net isn’t just a collection of strands; it’s an adaptive network of mutually reinforcing elements, each connected, each playing a role. Its strength doesn’t come from any single node but from the relationships between them, aligning with leverage points in a complex system.¹

These examples should make it clear that holistic interventions aren’t limited to health—they happen all the time, across every domain of human life. An environmental conservation campaign might involve changing zoning laws, addressing sources of pollution, restoring wetlands, and creating wildlife corridors—all working together toward a shared goal. When consultants help businesses overcome challenges, they rarely recommend just one change; instead, they assess the organization as a whole, considering factors like leadership, communication, and workflows. Even some battlefield strategies could be seen as holistically designed.

It’s important to point this out because many people assume that engaging with holism means engaging in “woo”—a kind of magical thinking. But that’s not it at all. Holism is about distributing effort within a strategy so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

This matters for an herbalist because while most herbs don’t act on the bodymind as forcefully as pharmaceuticals (though some certainly do), they can be remarkably powerful within a holistic strategy. In fact, each individual herb—unlike most drugs—contains multiple chemical constituents that interact synergistically, each herb essentially weaving its own net. That’s a fascinating rabbit hole, but one we needn’t explore right now.

Despite often being cast as the antagonist to holism, modern biomedicine isn’t philosophically opposed to it. In practice, many medical providers apply a form of holism when they can—pairing drug prescriptions with dietary, lifestyle, or sleep hygiene recommendations, and making referrals to other practitioners. But structural obstacles make deeply integrative, holistic care difficult. Overspecialization—an issue the field is well aware of—fragments treatment, while the inherent limitations of the 15-minute office visit leave little room for a truly holistic approach.

Holism in Name Only

With all this in mind, we can turn our attention back to wellness influencers and see, with renewed clarity, that despite their attachment to holism as a brand, what they offer is usually far from holistic. Holistic care inherently clashes with online marketing’s demand for bite-sized blurbs and streamlined calls to action. It can’t be distilled into articles like “10 Herbs to Fight Inflammation” or “They Don’t Want You to Know About This Cure for Migraines.” No single product is holistic in a vacuum—an inconvenient truth for entrepreneurs selling simplified solutions to consumers who seek the real benefits of a holistic approach.

The wellness market pushes product instead of emergent process. It’s reductionism wrapped in a ‘natural’ aesthetic—a far cry from care that respects complexity, adapts over time, and truly engages the whole person.

A thoroughly holistic approach to health must extend beyond the individual—and beyond the usual limits of a practitioner’s relationship with a client. Our bodies do not end at the surface of our skin (for more on this, see my 2015 essay with Janet Kent, Radical Vitalism). We are entangled with the life around us and with everything that moves through us. We are shaped by history, by social and political conditions.

This should be obvious, yet its implications for physical and mental health reveal what wellness entrepreneurs don’t want you to see: the so-called social determinants of health—poverty, food deserts, systemic medical neglect, trauma, racism, labor exploitation, and more. All of these make it clear that health is never an individual achievement, but always an expression of collective reality.

The Other Half of Holism

With this, we arrive at another, though interrelated, dimension of holism—one that goes beyond designing interventions. Holism is also a lens for understanding how complex systems function in the first place. Applied to the human body, it reminds us that assessing digestion means considering the nervous system and the gut microbiome. The gut, in turn, influences the immune system and inflammation. Inflammation affects the cardiovascular system. Nutrition shapes all of these, bringing us back to digestion again. These connections permeate the organism, reverberating through every level of function.

You can describe dependencies in an ecosystem in much the same way. The point is not a vague truism that ‘everything is connected to everything else,’ but rather that everything is connected to something—often many things—which are themselves connected to others, in a chain of relationships that shapes the whole. The specifics matter.²

A holistic understanding allows us to see further into the pattern, helping us assess what drives suffering. When faced with an itchy, scaly rash, we can look beyond the skin itself and ask what it might reflect about the gut, the liver, or other underlying systems. While we’ll likely apply something topically for quick relief, a holistic approach considers the whole body—offering interventions that reduce the likelihood of the rash recurring.

Holism allows us to trace deeper causes—it improves our ‘diagnosis,’ if you will—which, in turn, paves the way for more lasting and sustainable improvements. It also helps us identify key areas where support is likely to create cascading benefits. This is why herbal protocols so often include the nervous and digestive systems—strengthening these foundations lays the groundwork for positive shifts in nearly any body.

As mentioned, a holistic view quickly takes us beyond the individual, because everything about the body—the gut and the nervous system being two clear examples—is in deep relationship with the world around us. Even when we begin with a single person’s suffering, tracing what drives that suffering inevitably leads outward. Recognizing this can help us appreciate something the wellness world gets right—something that health justice analyses, with their focus on the social determinants of health, often overlook.

What Wellness Gets Right

Leftist analyses of health under capitalism tend to focus on worker exploitation, oppression, and unequal access to care. Historically, the worker’s body in relation to production has been central, and social reproduction theory expands this focus by examining how capitalism offloads the costs of care—through unpaid labor, healthcare privatization, and similar mechanisms. These are crucial critiques, but they don’t always account for what becomes clear when we understand the human body through our holistic lens: how capitalism has reshaped the human environment in ways that generate chronic disease at a population scale.

The food system is an obvious case in point. Under capitalism, food is a commodity, and the profit motive shapes every stage—its production on farms, its processing for consumption, and its marketing to consumers. The system is structured to maximize profit, not nutrition or well-being. Food deserts exist because providing fresh food in poor communities isn’t profitable. Many processed foods are deliberately engineered for addiction, with the food industry using “neuromarketing” to deepen consumer dependence. The global rise in type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome tracks directly with the expansion of capitalist food markets.

At the core of the capitalist empire, immune dysregulation is exploding—chronic inflammation, asthma, allergies, and autoimmunity are all on the rise. As always, genetics play a role. But so does the food system, along with the effects of chronic stress and trauma, and, as we’ve become increasingly aware, the loss of microbial diversity under conditions of capitalist development and coerced urbanization.

The drive to cut costs and maintain profit in the food system results in foods that fail to sustain our microbiome, directly undermining immune regulation. Cities, in themselves, need not be unhealthy—but under capitalism, where urban priorities are dictated by the real estate industry and the imperatives of labor exploitation and private wealth accumulation, access to nature, clean air, and leisure time is systematically deprioritized. The result is predictable: the health and safety of our bodyminds—including the needs of our microbiomes—inevitably suffer.

We could also look at how market incentives within the healthcare system shape medicine itself in ways that fail to meet our needs. We could talk about the billions that pharmaceutical companies stand to make from biologics designed to manage autoimmunity.

But in exploring these connections, we step into uncomfortable territory for the left. Why is that?

Everything I’ve described here—how capitalism shapes our environments, our means of survival, and the nature of medicine—has well-documented consequences for public health. And yet, these observations have been heavily co-opted by right-libertarians, who distort them to emphasize health as an individual achievement and illness as a moral failing.

Mainstream culture already tends to blame people for their health outcomes, but in the wellness world, this tendency is amplified. The existence of personal actions that could improve metabolic or immune health—dietary changes, exercise, stress reduction—easily morphs into the implication that not taking those actions is a personal failing, or even a ‘choice.’ And believe me, I’ve sat through many a conference presentation where a speaker patronizingly refers to “Americans” who “prefer” watching TV and eating Froot Loops over “doing something good for their body.”

What wellness gets right is that modern disease is systemic, and increasing. Wellness advocates aren’t wrong to be angry at a society that applies pharmaceuticals to the consequences of a broken food system. Understanding this anger helps explain the fervor for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who presents himself as a vehicle for much-needed change. But his politics and activism—his zeal for privatization, his intent to roll back public health—don’t offer real solutions. Rather, they embody the failures of libertarian wellness culture, deepening the very problems he claims to fight.

Wellness discourse recognizes that illness is systemic, but it misidentifies the causes and offers only individualized, consumer-friendly solutions. It blames modernity instead of capitalism, steering people toward reactionary conservatism or primitivism. It blames ‘elites’ rather than structural forces, framing increasing ill health as the work of malevolent actors rather than the predictable outcome of capitalist market logic. And because ‘institutions can’t be trusted,’ it rejects public health measures outright—leaning into right-wing populism instead of problem-solving rooted in collective accountability.

What’s more, the wellness industry is itself a symptom of the same structural forces driving chronic disease to new heights. It doesn’t solve our public health crises—it capitalizes on them. Through wellness, capitalism metabolizes its own critique, transforming systemic failure into just another market. Instead of addressing the root problem, it rebrands it and sells an expensive lifestyle of ‘opting out.’

Crucially, wellness cures are positioned as an alternative to both biomedicine and public health, discouraging us from fighting for universal access and stronger public health policies. In doing so, they offer no solidarity to those who struggle to access medical care—instead, they implicitly support medical abandonment.

Taking it Back

We can do better. We can change this sorry state of affairs. We can reclaim our hard-earned understanding of how systemic forces weave into our bodies and shape our health from those whose priority is to individualize and marketize it. We can make it clear that holistic health issues are health justice issues: A truly just society wouldn’t just provide healthcare—it would work to dismantle the economic and environmental forces driving chronic illness in the first place.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pledge to fight chronic disease has been criticized as a form of eugenics, and his worldview is undeniably fascistic—rooted in the worship of strength and an aversion to the divergent and the infirm. In my view, his approach to health is eugenic. However, fighting air pollution to reduce asthma rates, for example, is not inherently eugenics. We must be able to distinguish between wanting sick people to disappear (eugenics) and wanting to reduce preventable suffering—suffering that, in many cases, is caused or exacerbated by capitalism.

A material, political, and truly holistic account of health under capitalism is a missing piece—one that must be reintegrated for the left to achieve a fully systemic analysis. I say reintegrated because these very concerns, now sidelined under the ‘holistic’ banner, were once central to radical thought. When leftist discourse fails to examine how capitalist market structures actively generate disease, that analytical gap is readily filled by right-libertarian wellness culture.

The left can be skittish about engaging with sickness prevention. But failing to articulate a politicized and collectivized vision for countering chronic illness allows it to be framed as a personal responsibility—and illness as a personal failing. It also risks naturalizing forms of suffering that are, in reality, preventable through systemic change.

Our collective health depends on recognizing that:

• Chronic stress is one of the biggest drivers of illness, yet we live in a culture that manufactures stress—through economic precarity, overwork, and lack of social support.

• People are suffering not because they’ve failed to take care of themselves, but because their environments and society have failed to support their well-being.

• When the most affordable, accessible foods contribute to metabolic disease, the ‘choice’ of what to eat is already constrained by the system.

• Any chronic illness that becomes widespread within a culture is the result of systemic forces at work—it can’t be reduced to an individual’s ‘poor choices.’

• Instead of ensuring that the foundations of health are universally accessible, capitalism makes us compete for them—if you can’t afford whole foods, exercise, or access to nature, too bad.

• The goal isn’t just to make better individual choices, nor is it simply to have access to healthcare—it’s to fight for a world where the default conditions of life don’t make us sick.

To support health holistically, we can fight to decommodify healthcare, food, and housing. We can rebuild cities for movement, community, and social well-being. We can reintegrate biodiversity into human life.

We can care about what’s driving chronic disease without falling into ableist or eugenic narratives. We can recognize that the health of our guts, our immune systems, and our epigenetic expression are political and historical battlefields—conditions we did not create, yet over which we may still exert some influence. And that influence can grant us a little more room to breathe.

Even the best forms of holistic care—accessible, relational, adaptive, emergent—are not “the answer” to suffering, illness, aging, or debility. These are part of the world and will not be erased from it. Nor is holistic care, on its own, the answer to preventable suffering driven by oppression and exploitation—unless we mean “holistic care” in the broadest possible sense.

The kind of holistic interventions I began by describing, even at their most effective, are still harm reduction strategies for living in an unjust world. They give us more room to breathe.

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I want to spend more time exploring what kinds of healing holistic care can truly offer—because while it is powerful, it’s too often framed as a linear path toward an ideal body or the restoration of a lost wholeness—ideas that are both harmful and misleading.

We also need to talk about how individual care relates to community care.

But first, I need to examine how holistic medicine is dismissed—not just for cultural or political reasons, but on supposedly 'scientific' grounds as well—and how the debunkers may fail to grasp what it is they’re actually debunking.

That will be Part 3.

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Dave Meesters is an herbalist at River Island Community Herb Clinic and the Terra Sylva School of Botanical Medicine

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1. The beauty of a net is that, because it’s made of crossing lines with space between, it can influence a large area while using minimal material. Its strength comes from the connections between its nodes, not from the strands themselves. For those inclined toward technology, a mesh network operates on a similar principle—its name reflecting the same interwoven structure as a net.

2. “The brand of holist ecological philosophy that emphasizes that ‘everything is connected to everything,’ will not help us here. Rather, everything is connected to something, which is connected to something else. While we may all ultimately be connected to one another, the specificity and proximity of connections matters.” —Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life at the Edge of Extinction, 60.