Holistic care is a fashionable way of prescribing a solution, but how capable are we (as a society, or as an individual care giver) to provide care for the whole of someone’s life? Weekly consults or therapy sessions in many cases are inadequate to the task of transforming lives. Exercises prescribed during physical therapy visits are rarely done at home. Advice is easily given, yet can be extremely challenging to adhere to depending on one’s circumstances. “Eat food, most vegetables, not too much”, “Calories in, calories out”, “Stop smoking”, etc. It’s not so much that advice falls on def ears, but that a person’s limbic system finds it much less salient than the dopamine reward from a maladaptive behavior. This salience mismatch is a largely unconscious neurological bias between imbalanced survival patterns. The patterns are imprinted to a strong degree during a premyelinated childhood. Having the “willpower” or “grit” to imprint new patterns is itself a pattern or mechanism that ALSO needs to be developed in childhood. To blame or shame a person for not behaving or not being able to adjust their behavior WITHOUT taking into account the unconscious, hard set survival mechanisms (learned at a young age) is unhelpful and sometimes harmful. There is hope, however, learning can happen! But, it takes lots of practice and lots of repetitions. That’s why we have mentors and coaches. Though, when the patterns that need to be reset or overridden are pervasive lifestyle habits, a person would almost need a coach to live life with them to catch and respond to enough opportunities to imprint change. This is what schools (should) do, this is why we have childhood. We have the opportunity when kids are in schools, brains are plastic and receptive, they aren’t already occupied with the necessities of living life when imprinting new habits is time-consuming and expensive. So, I’m all for more holistic care, we just have to be willing to actually provide it. Better yet, we can teach and empower the next generation through our schools.