ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses variety of treatment modalities that demonstrate the therapeutic use of stress to provoke physiological recovery. Lightening the body load and replenishing the body reserves will reinforce the system's resilience and capacity to tolerate the stress of life. The system's ability to cope with stress, thereby forestalling the system's transitioning into the stage of late chronic disease, it is therefore critically important that therapeutic interventions target the system's allostatic load and adaptation reserves. Environmental stressors may therefore take the form of such challenges as an anxiety-provoking but ultimately health-promoting interpretation; the accumulation of metabolic waste products in the body; an interpersonal disappointment; exposure to the aluminum found in antiperspirants or the mercury found in dental amalgams, etc,. Stressful input is inherently neither bad nor good, which is to say that the therapist's interventions are inherently neither toxic nor therapeutic. The therapeutic intent of the holistic practitioner is to precipitate disruption in order to trigger repair.
