I am your destiny.

What do Dirk Gently and Doctor Who have in common? Douglas Adams for one, but that is not the one I mean.

Holism.

It is the belief that everything should be approached as wholes, not just a sum of the pieces that put it together. It is the belief that everything is connected to everything else. It is the viewpoint that things happen because of (sometimes far-fetched) links to previous and/or future events, or in other words time is not a direct continuation from cause to effect, but more of a timey wimey wibbly wobbly... stuff. While that may be a bit hard to believe, one mustn't forget that it is basically the same as predestination, which many do believe in. It is a way of saying that everything must be just about right in relation to one another. A single abnormality, and a pathology emerges, similarly to chaos theory.

While holism has been considered to be a bit out-dated and silly, it is making a comeback in medicine. For a while now medicine has concentrated on researching and curing the illnesses. And in the search for the ultimate cure, the patient has become an object, just something to poke sticks and needles at, something to be fixed. But a disease is not just local to a knee or an eye, it has immense psychological effect, and so does the cure. Placebo pills have healed people of numerous ailments, and the same improvement-boosting effect can be achieved by moral support. Keep the patient happy and there is a greater chance for a speedy full recovery. When it comes to exterminating evil-doers, hearts and minds matter more than bombs and guns. A person willing to be healed has better chances than that who believes that their time to die has come. Positive bias has been proven to work in everyday life, and it works when you are in trouble, be it illness or injury.

Holism is actually quite simple to comprehend. An event, no matter how small, that we encounter, changes us. A small influence can have enormous effect on our futures, because everything in the whole wide Universe is connected. We are all connected biologically, chemically, and atomically. We are just specks on the large scale, which is why we are vulnerable to tiny abnormalities. It's just what and who we are.