You have probably had the appointment. A short slot, one concern per visit, and a feeling on the drive home that the things you never got to mention were somehow connected to the one you did. Sleep, mood, energy, the way your cycle has shifted, the stress you carry for everyone else in the house. Each has its own specialist, and nobody seems to be looking at all of them at once.
That frustration is a big part of why the word “holistic” is everywhere now: on serum bottles, studio signs, clinic websites, usually with very little meaning attached. Finding what helps your own body is mostly trial and error, and clinicians will tell you that the cause of how you feel often goes unidentified. A word that promises the whole picture is appealing for exactly that reason. So it is worth knowing what it means, where it came from, and what you can do with it.
Where the Word Came From
“Holism” is younger than it sounds. The South African statesman Jan Smuts is generally credited with coining it in his 1926 book Holism and Evolution, from the Greek holos, meaning whole. He meant a broad philosophical idea about how wholes form in nature, not anything about doctors, and the word wandered for decades before it settled into the everyday sense of a whole being more than its parts.
The idea behind it is much older than the word. And twenty years after Smuts, it was written into the founding constitution of the World Health Organization, signed in 1946, which defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO Constitution). That sentence is still there. Read it slowly and it is a fairly bold one: by that definition, a clean blood test and feeling well are not the same thing.
What Older Traditions Already Assumed
Most of the traditional systems women have leaned on for centuries never needed the word, because looking at the whole person was where they started. Ayurveda, the traditional system of India, begins with a person’s constitution and weighs the season, her diet, her daily routine, and her temperament alongside whatever brought her in. Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine commonly ask about sleep, appetite, digestion, and emotional state before they get anywhere near the complaint itself. Many Indigenous traditions place a person’s health inside her family, her community, and her relationship with the land.
None of that makes those systems right about everything, and you cannot hold their records to the standard of a modern study. What they share is an instinct a lot of women recognize: you are one person, not a set of parts that happen to share a calendar. Our piece on how cultures around the world have approached menopause shows how differently that instinct played out from one place to the next.
How Medicine Split You Into Parts
Modern medicine went the other way, and for good reasons. Specialization is a large part of why it became so precise. When you need a cardiologist, you want one who has spent years on nothing but the heart, and nobody should get nostalgic about the era before that.
The cost showed up in the gaps between offices, and women have often felt it most. For decades much of the research behind medical advice was done largely on men, a history we went through in a short history of women’s hormones. Experiences that cross categories, like a cycle that changes at the same time as your sleep and your mood, never fit neatly on one specialist’s desk.
In 1977, the psychiatrist George Engel published a paper in Science called “The need for a new medical model: a challenge for biomedicine.” He argued that the dominant biomedical model left no room for the social, psychological, and behavioral side of illness, and proposed what he called a biopsychosocial model in its place (the paper on PubMed). It became one of the most cited ideas in medical teaching. It also tells you something about how recent all this is: within living memory, someone had to argue in a leading journal that a patient’s life counts as part of her health.
Mainstream Medicine Is Saying It Too
The word is no longer confined to wellness shops. The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, part of the NIH, describes “whole person health” as looking at the whole person, “not just separate organs or body systems” (NCCIH).
The newest example landed on October 26, 2026. Four large medical groups, the American Heart Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, published a framework in the journal Circulation that follows heart health in girls and women across four life stages, from the years around a first period to the years after menopause, with pregnancy considered as something that can happen along the way (American Heart Association announcement). Sadiya S. Khan of Northwestern University, who chaired the writing group, said that “heart health cannot be understood by looking at the heart alone.” The groups describe the age ranges as approximate and say women-specific evidence still has gaps that need more research.
That is a cardiology statement, not a wellness one, and it has nothing to do with any product. It is worth noticing because it says, in a medical journal, something many women have been saying at kitchen tables for years: what happens in one part of your life tends to show up in the others.
What a Holistic View Looks Like on an Ordinary Week
You do not need a practitioner with “holistic” in their title to take a wider view of yourself. A handful of habits get you most of the way there.
- Keep a simple running note. One line a day about sleep, energy, mood, and where you are in your cycle. After a couple of months you have something no short appointment can produce: a pattern, in your own words, with dates on it.
- Bring the whole list. Mention the things that seem unrelated. Connecting them is your provider’s job, and nobody can connect what they never hear.
- Start with the unglamorous basics. Rest, regular meals, movement you will actually keep doing, and people who understand you. They are boring to read about and they sit underneath everything else.
- Change one thing at a time. If you decide to explore a tea, a practice, a supplement, or a cream, start one and give it a while before you add the next. Otherwise your notes cannot tell you anything.
- Protect a small ritual. Two minutes that belong only to you count. A routine attached to something you already do, like the end of a shower, is the one you will keep.
You will notice none of this requires buying anything. That is rather the point.
How to Read the Word on a Label
Because “holistic” describes an approach rather than an ingredient or a standard, it has no fixed definition you can check on a jar or a sign. That is not a reason to distrust everyone who uses it. It is a reason to ask what they mean by it.
A practitioner who takes a holistic view usually asks a lot of questions before suggesting anything, wants to know about your medications and your other care, and is comfortable telling you when something is outside what they do. A product that calls itself holistic should still tell you exactly what is in it. The word is a promise about attention, and attention is something you can watch for.
Where a Cream Fits, and Where It Does Not
Taking the whole picture seriously also means being honest about ranking. Nothing in a jar sees the whole picture for you. There are many non-pharmaceutical things a woman may choose to explore, and the ones that matter most are rarely bought: a provider who listens, enough sleep, meals that keep you going, and friends who do not need everything explained.
Ours is a small one among them. Weed & Root Wild Yam Root Cream is made with wild yam, red clover, and chasteberry extracts in a base of shea butter and sweet almond oil, with vitamin E, in a 2 oz jar made in the USA. Wild yam has a long record in women’s herbal traditions, and for many women part of the appeal is simply the two quiet minutes of using it. That is a modest place in a whole routine, and we think it is the honest one.
If your cycle has changed, your bleeding is heavy or unpredictable, you take prescription medication, or something is disrupting your life, start with a qualified provider. A good one will want the whole picture too.
Common Questions
What does holistic women’s health mean?
Looking at a woman as a whole person, physical, emotional, and social, rather than as a set of separate symptoms or organs. It describes an approach to care, not a particular product or therapy.
Who coined the word holism?
The South African statesman Jan Smuts is generally credited with it, in his 1926 book Holism and Evolution. It comes from the Greek holos, meaning whole.
Is holistic health the same as alternative medicine?
No. Holistic describes a way of looking at a person, and conventional clinicians can take that view as readily as anyone. Mainstream bodies now use similar language, such as the NIH’s term “whole person health.”
What is the biopsychosocial model?
An idea the psychiatrist George Engel set out in a 1977 paper in Science, arguing that medicine should account for the psychological and social sides of illness as well as the biological one.
How can I take a more holistic view of my own health?
Keep a short daily note on sleep, energy, mood, and your cycle, bring the whole list to appointments, look after the basics, and change one thing at a time so you can tell what makes a difference for you.
Nobody hands you the whole picture in one appointment. You put it together yourself, a line in a notebook at a time, and the person who knows the most about it is the one reading this.