In short: a holistic medicine practitioner treats the person, not the file. At Natural Medical Solutions Wellness Center in Roswell, GA, Dr. Gail Ravello, IMD, ND has spent more than three decades working this way, and she does it alongside your other doctors rather than instead of them.
The word gets used loosely enough that it has started to mean very little, so it is worth being specific. Holistic care means the thing you came in about is treated as one piece of information rather than the whole story. Your sleep, your diet, your stress load, the medication you have been on for eleven years, the job, the house, the year you had: all of it is on the table, because all of it affects how you feel.
That is not a philosophical position. It is a practical one. Recurring headaches, gut trouble that will not settle, fatigue that outlasts every good night's sleep and hormone symptoms that arrive together rarely have one cause. Treating them one at a time, by separate people who never speak to each other, is how a person ends up on six prescriptions and no better.
These four words get used interchangeably, including by practices that should know better. They are not the same thing, and knowing the difference will help you choose sensibly.
An approach. Whole person, not one part. Any clinician can work this way. It describes how the problem is framed, not which therapies get used.
A discipline, with its own training and its own toolkit: nutrition, botanicals, homeopathy, lifestyle. See naturopathic medicine.
A method, built on testing and systems. It asks what is going on underneath, usually with laboratory work to answer it. See functional medicine.
A model of care: natural and conventional medicine working together on the same patient. See integrative medicine.
In this practice they overlap constantly. A visit is holistic in how it is framed, naturopathic in what gets used, functional when a question needs a test to answer it, and integrative because we would rather write to your cardiologist than work around them. You will also see the term alternative medicine practitioner applied to work like this. We use it sparingly, because very little of what we do is meant to be an alternative to anything.
Longer than you are used to. The first appointment is mostly listening, because the history is where the answer usually is. Expect questions about things that seem unrelated: what you ate yesterday, how you sleep, what changed in the year before the symptoms started, what you have already tried and what happened when you did.
Most of it falls into a few groups: hormone symptoms, digestive complaints, fatigue and stress-related exhaustion, thyroid trouble, allergies and autoimmune conditions, persistent pain, and the broad wish to stop feeling below par without knowing where to start. Weight, energy and sleep come up in nearly every conversation regardless of what brought the person in.
The honest description of the benefit is this: people generally feel better, sleep better and understand their own body better, and some longstanding complaints settle once the thing driving them is dealt with. That is worth having. It is not a miracle, and we would rather say so.
We are on Upper Hembree Road in Roswell, a few minutes from Alpharetta and easy to reach from Atlanta, Johns Creek, Marietta, Milton, Cumming, Sandy Springs and Woodstock. The wellness center page covers the building and everything offered under its roof, and the new patient guide covers what to bring.
Bring the whole picture, including the parts you assume are irrelevant. They usually are not.
Request an AppointmentStart your personalized naturopathic, functional & holistic care plan in Roswell, GA, proudly serving Alpharetta, Atlanta & the greater Fulton County area.
