Glossary: Integrative Medicine and Nutrition

Hades

Lord of the underworld and uncle of Persephone, whom he abducted into the underworld.

Healing Touch

An energy therapy in which practitioners consciously use their hands in a heart-centered and intentional way to support and facilitate physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. 

Heart Rate Variability (HRV)

The naturally occurring beat-to-beat changes in heart rate that are an accepted measure of autonomic nervous system function.

Hermes

 The wing-footed messenger of the Greek gods (known by the Romans as Mercury).

Heuristic

 Methods of problem-solving or learning by experience, particularly by trial and error.

Historical Trauma

The sociohistorical experience of cultural groups exposed to prolonged stress and suffering resulting from war, genocide, and interpersonal violence. For example, the experience of American Indians as a result of colonization.

Homeopathy

 A system of medical practice that treats a disease especially by the administration of minute doses of a remedy that would in healthy persons produce symptoms similar to those of the disease.

Hydrotherapy

Also called water therapy, hydrotherapy is the application or use of water (cold, hot, steam, or ice) to relieve pain and discomfort, facilitate breath and relieve asthma, and promote physical well-being.

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT)

Application of oxygen to the treatment of trauma. This is the inhalation of 100% oxygen inside a hyperbaric chamber, pressurized to greater than 1 atmosphere (atm). HBOT causes both mechanical and physiological effects by inducing a state of increased pressure and hyperoxia. Originally designed as a treatment for decompression illness experienced by divers and for healing burns and wounds in hospitals, innovative “off-label” uses include cardiovascular health, autism, stroke, and cognitive decline, and TBI.

Hypermnesia

An exceptional ability to remember seen in some mental illnesses.

Hyperventilation Syndrome (HVS)

Over-breathing often in response to anxiety.

Hypnosis

The therapeutic induction of trance states resembling sleep and the use of suggestion.

Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis (HPA Axis)

A major part of the neuroendocrine system that regulates reactions to stress and other metabolic function. It involves the interactions of the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and the adrenal glands.

Hysteria

Hyster is Greek for womb. In ancient Greece, the suffocating uterus was deemed the cause of hysteria. The cluster of symptoms now diagnosed as posttraumatic stress has a long history of other names, the most enduring of which was hysteria.