When Acute Care Is the Right Priority

There are moments when acute intervention is not just appropriate, but life-saving. When someone is in a medical emergency, the most compassionate and skilled thing we can do is act quickly. This is not the time for a full root cause analysis. Sometimes we need the tourniquet before we tend the wound.

Allopathic medicine at its best is extraordinary in these moments. Trauma care, emergency surgery, antibiotics for a life-threatening infection — these interventions save lives. There is no herbal equivalent for a ruptured appendix, and I say that as someone who loves plants deeply.

Acute care is not the enemy of holistic care. It is what makes space for holistic care to follow.

When Holistic Care Becomes Essential

Once the acute threat is stabilized, the work shifts. This is where conventional medicine too often stops and holistic medicine begins, and where the greatest gap in our current healthcare model lives.

Chronic conditions do not resolve with a prescription alone. Fatigue, autoimmunity, hormonal imbalance, metabolic disruption, anxiety, and inflammation are not just diagnostic terms. They are the body communicating that something in the terrain — physical, emotional, environmental — needs to change.

Without addressing root causes, we risk revolving door medicine: patients cycling through crises without ever building the conditions for true recovery. Holistic approaches offer what conventional care rarely has time to provide: relationship with the body, attention to lifestyle, nutritional and herbal support, and the slower, more patient work of restoring function.

Zooming In and Zooming Out

One of the most useful shifts we can make as healers (and as patients) is to practice zooming in and out simultaneously.

Zoomed in, we see the individual body: gut microbiome disruption, nutrient depletions, neuroendocrine dysregulation, immune activation, and chronic inflammation. These are real and they are addressable.

Zoomed out, we see the larger picture: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil our food grows in. We see the chemical load our bodies are processing, the microplastics circulating in our blood, the climate-related stressors affecting our nervous systems.

True holistic and functional medicine cannot stop at the individual. The body does not exist in isolation. It is in constant relationship with the environment around it.

The Macrocosm Is the Root Cause

This is where I want to invite you into a bigger frame. If we are serious about root cause medicine, we have to follow the thread all the way out.

Soil depletion means our food is less nutritious than it was fifty years ago. Pollution and microplastics are not theoretical threats: they are showing up in human tissue, in breast milk, in fetal cord blood. Climate instability affects our sleep, our stress hormones, our respiratory health, our food systems. These are not political talking points. They are biological realities with clinical consequences.

The microcosm reflects the macrocosm. If Gaia were a living organism, as many traditions across the world have always understood her to be, then we are her cells. Our individual health is inseparable from the health of the whole.

This does not mean we stop treating individual patients. It means we stop pretending we can heal people while ignoring the world they live in.

The Both/And Path Forward

Here is what I know to be true: we can hold both. We can offer individualized protocols and evidence-informed care while also naming the systemic forces that are making people sick. We can recommend supplements and also advocate for cleaner water. We can treat the patient in front of us and also care about the soil their food comes from.

It is not either/or. It never was.

Think of it the way biology works. A healthy organism needs nutrient density and efficient waste removal. It needs resources coming in and toxins moving out. If we only focus on one side of that equation, if we pour in nutrients but never address what is depleting them — we are not actually healing. We are treading water.

The same is true at the collective level. We cannot endlessly extract without replenishing. 

We cannot continue to produce illness faster than we can treat it and call that a healthcare system. Something deeper has to shift.

Where This Series Has Been Taking Us

This post sits at the hinge of two bodies of work. The Free Will series asked: what does it mean to reclaim your knowing, your sovereignty, your right to choose your own healing path? The upcoming Born of the Earth series will be asking: where do we come from, what sustains us, what do we owe back to the living world?

This bridge is the answer to both questions at once: we heal ourselves within a larger ecology of care. Our personal sovereignty is not separate from collective responsibility. Our individual health is not separate from planetary health.

Change starts with us. It starts with the questions we are willing to ask, the systems we are willing to examine, and the medicine we choose to practice and receive.

Future generations are depending on us to choose wisely.

With roots and reverence, Marina

 Ready to start building a more holistic medicine cabinet? Download the free Natural Medicine Cabinet Remake Guide here.

Works Cited

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3. Pizzorno, J. E., & Murray, M. T. (2013). Textbook of Natural Medicine (4th ed.). Churchill Livingstone.
4. Shiva, V. (2016). Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis. North Atlantic Books.
5. Swan, S. H., & Colino, S. (2021). Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. Scribner.
6. Alaee, M., et al. (2003). An overview of commercially used brominated flame retardants, their applications, their use patterns in different countries/regions and possible modes of release. Environment International, 29(6), 683–689.
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8. Davis, D. R., Epp, M. D., & Riordan, H. D. (2004). Changes in USDA food composition data for 43 garden crops, 1950 to 1999. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 23(6), 669–682.