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I’ve always been willing to take risks and chances. Often I’m on talk shows and hosts will ask ‘How do you feel about it, when people say you're controversial?’ And I say that, ‘I think if I stop being controversial, I wouldn't be doing my job.’
The Healing Power of Nature
Andrew Thomas Weil was born in Philadelphia, where his parents operated a millinery store. From the beginning, he was an academically gifted student, and on graduating high school, he won admission to Harvard University, where he majored in biology. At Harvard, he studied with the pioneering ethnobotanist Richard Schultes, who ignited his interest in the medicinal plants used in traditional medicine around the world. As a student, Weil also demonstrated a nascent literary talent, serving as an editor of the daily campus newspaper,The Harvard Crimson, and the humor publicationThe Harvard Lampoon. He graduated in 1964, with a degree in biology, concentrating in botany, writing his senior thesis on the narcotic properties of the common spice nutmeg. Although he was not certain he wanted to pursue the medical profession, he enrolled in Harvard Medical School, believing the training would be valuable to a scientific career. The turbulent atmosphere of the 1960s spread to the halls of the medical school as well, and in his second year, Weil joined a group of medical students who successfully petitioned to be excused from classes and to prepare for their examinations independently. By the mid-1960s, marijuana was the subject of enormous public controversy but there was virtually no scientific literature on its actual properties. In his final year of medical school, Weil undertook a serious clinical study of the drug, the first of its kind, and his results became the subject of widespread discussion in the press.
Weil received his medical degree in 1968, and carried out an internship at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco. The hospital served the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the center of the ‘60s counterculture at its height, and Dr. Weil had numerous opportunities to observe the effects of hallucinogens and addictive drugs. The following year, he accepted an offer from the National Institute of Mental Health to direct a study of psychoactive drugs, but he felt constrained by the political atmosphere of Washington and soon returned to independent research. In 1971, Dr. Weil joined the staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum and received a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs. He spent three years traveling throughout the Americas and Africa, studying the use of medicinal plants in the traditional practices of indigenous peoples.
During this period, he published his first book,The Natural Mind (1972). In this work, Weil first iterated his thesis that psychoactive drugs are used to access capacities that already exist within the mind and that can be experienced without the use of drugs. He elaborated on this theme inThe Marriage of the Sun and Moon (1980), and a comprehensive study of mind-altering substances,From Chocolate to Morphine (1983). In this book, he argued that the pursuit of altered states of consciousness through intoxicants has been a constant throughout human history, and is rooted in natural drives that are not innately self-destructive, but can be channeled in healthy directions. Beginning in the mid-1970s, in a variety of mass-circulation publications, he argued for reform of government drug policy.
Meanwhile, he continued his research, comparing the effects of organic compounds with synthetic pharmaceuticals. Noting that humans and plants evolved concurrently in the same environments, he came to believe that organic substances are more beneficially assimilated in the human body than synthetic ones. Dr. Weil sought to apply his discoveries by fusing the practices of alternative medicine with conventional medical practice in an approach he defined as “integrative medicine.” Emphasizing nutrition, exercise and stress reduction to maintain the body’s natural healing systems, he supports the use of conventional medicine for more radical intervention in the event of health crises. He presented these ideas to a general audience inHealth and Healing: The Philosophy of Integrative Medicine (1983).
In 1983, Dr. Weil joined the faculty of the University of Arizona College of Medicine as a clinical professor, and also taught in the department of family and community medicine. At the same time, he maintained a general medical practice in Tucson, focusing on natural and preventive medicine and diagnosis. In the following years, he established the Foundation for Integrative Medicine and served as editor-in-chief of the journalIntegrative Medicine.
In 1994, he founded the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Today, it is known as the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, and Dr. Weil serves as its program director. The center has trained hundreds of physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners in the techniques of integrative medicine.
Dr. Weil has continued to present his teachings to the general public through a series of bestselling books:Natural Health, Natural Medicine (1995);Spontaneous Healing (1995) andEight Weeks to Optimum Health (1997). InThe Healthy Kitchen (2002), he encouraged readers to consume more whole, unprocessed foods and organic produce, and to reduce the consumption of meat and dairy, replacing it with the protein and omega-3 fatty acids found in nuts and fish.
As Weil and his contemporaries have aged, he has addressed the challenges of maturity in books such asHealthy Aging (2005).Integrative Oncology (2009) applies the principles of integrative medicine to the treatment of cancer, whileWhy Our Health Matters (2009) treats more general questions of public health in a larger social context. In addition to more books on diet and nutrition, has written extensively health and the mind-body connection in books such asMind Over Meds (2017).
Americans spend $30.2 billion a year on alternative and complementary medicines and procedures. None of it is covered by insurance. Half of the money — $14.7 billion — was spent visiting acupuncturists, homeopaths, and massage therapists. Natural product supplements, excluding vitamins and diet supplements, cost $12.8 billion. And, $2.7 billion was paid for self-care, including expenses for books on diet-based therapies, mediation, biofeedback and other treatments. $30.2 billion is only one percent of the nation’s total health care bill of $2.82 trillion. But the $12.8 billion spent on natural product supplements is 24 percent of the $54 billion spent on prescription drugs, and the $14.7 billion in visits for alternative procedures, is almost a third of the out-of-pocket expenditures for visits to conventional physicians. Dr. Andrew Weil focuses on bridging the gap between the conventional and alternative health professions, because he believes that they have a tremendous amount to learn from each other.
Through Dr. Weil’s books, and the success of the Arizona Center, his ideas have gained widespread acceptance, and integrative medicine programs have been established at dozens of institutions, including the Mayo Clinic, Georgetown, Duke and Columbia Universities, and at Dr. Weil’s alma mater, Harvard Medical School. The Integrative Medicine in Residency Program is now a part of primary care residency education at 74 sites, with more than 1,500 alumni around the world.
Over the years, Andrew Weil made substantial donations to the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine from the considerable earning of his books and business ventures. By 2019, these gifts totaled $5 million. In spring of that year, he announced a gift of an additional $15 million, establishing an endowed chair in integrative medicine, another for research, and an endowed program fund. The center will henceforth be known as the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine. Dr. Weil’s gift assures that the University of Arizona will remain the world’s preeminent center for integrative medicine education, research and discovery
While Dr. Weil continues an active schedule of writing and public speaking, he also communicates directly with the general public through his popular website feature “Ask Dr. Weil.” He makes his home near Tucson, Arizona.
- Career
- Date of Birth
- June 8, 1942
“I think if I stop being controversial I wouldn’t be doing my job… I’m interested in things that don’t fit established conceptions… that don’t fit accepted models, and in trying to determine what’s true and useful.”
Andrew Weil’s first public controversy came when he was still a student at Harvard Medical School in 1968. His laboratory study of the effects of marijuana in human subjects was the first of its kind. The medical school would not permit him to perform the research on campus; he was forced to use the facilities of nearby Boston University instead. His conclusions, published inScience while he was still an intern, were widely condemned.
Dr. Weil continued on his own path, traveling widely to collect information on drug use in other cultures, on medicinal plants, and on alternative methods of treating disease. At the University of Arizona College of Medicine, he has led the first effort to change medical education to include information on alternative therapies, mind/body interactions, natural healing, and other subjects not usually emphasized in the training of physicians.
He has brought his findings to the general public through seven books, including the international bestsellers Spontaneous Healing andEight Weeks to Optimum Health. A frequent lecturer and guest on talk shows, Dr. Weil is an internationally recognized expert on drugs and addiction, medicinal plants, alternative medicine, and the reform of medical education.
The Healing Power of Nature
We understand you studied botany as an undergraduate, but you were a medical student at Harvard when you undertook the first major clinical study of marijuana. How did that come about?
Andrew Weil: In the ’60s, before I left the field of botany, marijuana was beginning to cross the line into the middle class in this culture, especially among students and young people, and there was an astonishing absence of scientific information about it. People were giving all sorts of opinions about what marijuana did, and there was almost no human research on it. In fact, there had only been two times in history that people have given marijuana to human subjects to see what it did. The last time had been in 1944, before the double-blind method was used. So there was almost a complete absence of scientific information about marijuana, but that didn’t stop lots of people from giving expert opinions on it.
What was the reaction of the school to that request?
Andrew Weil: This was in my senior year at Harvard Medical School. I devoted my whole senior elective time to research. I found another faculty advisor, Norman Finberg, a psychoanalyst who was another mentor of mine who was very interested in addictions.
I proposed doing a basic human study, using a double-blind method to find out the most basic questions about marijuana. First of all, I wanted to find out whether you could study it in the laboratory, how it affected basic vital functions and basic psychomotor functions. This was a big step to take. There was no legal mechanism for getting marijuana for research. There were many different federal and state agencies that were involved. A lawyer who was very interested in marijuana legal issues bet me that I would never be able to obtain permission to get marijuana to do human research. The attitude of the school was, they were very upset, the Human Subjects Committee. Because one of our experimental designs was that we wanted to give marijuana to people who never had it before, because we felt that expectation played an enormous role in determining the effects of marijuana. And people who had previously used it had expectations of what it would do. The Human Subjects Committee of the school took the position it would be unethical to expose people to marijuana who had never been exposed to it. We ended up doing the research at Boston University School of Medicine, because Harvard wouldn’t let it be done on their premises. And there was a lot of contention here, I mean, there were a lot of negotiations with many agencies and bureaucracies.
Did you feel that some of these ethical questions were valid?
Andrew Weil: I think they were valid, but they were surmountable. I think we had answers to them. The fear of the Human Subjects Committee was that one exposure to marijuana in a scientific experiment would lead people to become heroin addicts and then they would sue the university. I think that was a very unrealistic fear. There’s very little research to show that people who experiment with marijuana go on to use opiates for example.
It was a very interesting time. We did the experiments and got away with it, and got some very good publishable papers out of it. The main results were published as a lead article inScience in 1968. I think this was the first time it had been shown that you could study marijuana in a laboratory and deal with the various physical, social, ethical and medical problems that came up around that.
You got some pretty amazing results.
Andrew Weil: This was front-page news inTheNew York Times. Some people were upset by our conclusions, because we said that marijuana in these experiments seemed to be a relatively mild intoxicant. The effects were very heavily conditioned by people’s expectations. People who had no expectation often couldn’t tell whether they had smoked a placebo or smoked real marijuana. I think the results of those experiments have been validated over time. The paper has actually been reprinted a number of times as a model of clinical research.
That must be a source of immense pleasure to you, but at the time of the criticism you were a young man, and it could have had a negative impact on your career.
Andrew Weil: I’ve always been willing to take risks and chances. The most common word that I’ve heard used about the work I do is “controversial.” These days it’s less controversial. Often I’m on talk shows, and hosts will ask, “How do you feel about it, when people say you’re controversial?” And I say that, “I think if I stop being controversial I wouldn’t be doing my job.” I mean, this is just the kind of thing that I hone in on. I’m interested, as I said, in what doesn’t fit established conceptions, in looking at things that don’t fit accepted models. And in trying to determine what’s true and useful.
It’s also interesting that you’re applying firm, solid science, without necessarily advocating any particular conclusion.
Andrew Weil: Exactly. That’s been difficult for people to understand sometimes. Especially in my early work, I did a lot of work in the late ’60s and early ’70s in the field of addictions and psychoactive drugs. One of the products of that work was my first book,The Natural Mind, which laid out a theory that humans are born with an innate need to alter their consciousness, and considered the psychological and social implications of that. This need can be satisfied in many ways, drugs being just one of them. That was indeed a very controversial book. Later I wrote a book calledFrom Chocolate to Morphine, which was a review of all drugs that can affect the mind. And there was an organized attempt, this was in the early 1980s, to ban the book. And a prominent senator from Florida stood up on the floor of the Senate and waved the book around and said that this was a very dangerous book, because it was neutral, that it didn’t tell people to not use substances. And that’s exactly what I aimed for; I wanted to put out neutral information. And I think that when you’re working in situations that are very polarized, often neither side understands the middle position. You know, the position of neither advocating nor discouraging, of just trying to carve out a balanced path.
How do you live with that? It must be difficult.
Andrew Weil: It has been difficult. As I moved from writing about addiction, drugs and consciousness, to writing about health and medicine, I soon realized this was no less a controversial area to operate in. When I first became interested in alternative medicine in the early ’70s and began writing about it, I saw the same kind of polarization I had seen around the drug issues. “You’re for it or against it!” There were very few people who were trying to bring science to bear on these questions, and carve out a kind of middle position. I have a very strong sense of my own — of what’s right — and I’m able to operate fairly independent of all that kind of storm that goes on. And maybe I would relate that to my upbringing, and as I said, being an only child and having learned to be independent, and think for myself, and operate on my own. I would say, more than difficult, it was lonely for a long time. Because there were not other doctors out there who were advocating the kinds of things that I was doing. And I was often attacked from both sides. From the alternative side for being too mainstream, and from the mainstream side for being too alternative.
In many cases that means you’re on to something.
Andrew Weil: Well, I stayed with that something, and it’s been quite remarkable to watch the culture catch up with that.
Was your bookThe Natural Mind another theory that came from observation?
Andrew Weil: It came from my own experience, which I’ve always drawn on. I spent a lot of time in South America, and I learned Spanish very well. One of the things I was delighted to discover was that in Spanish, and other Romance languages, the words for “experience” and “experiment” are the same word. In Spanish, “esperimentar” means both to experience and to experiment. There’s a very interesting lesson there that we miss in English. That experience is a source of experimentation. One way to experiment is to look to your own experience. I have never been able to understand how people trying to investigate some phenomenon would rule out their own experience as one source of information about that phenomenon. For example…
One of the pieces of information that I put inThe Natural Mind was looking at the phenomenon of young children spinning to change their consciousness, whirling or spinning. You know, this appears at very young ages in all cultures. Every culture that I’ve ever been, kids spontaneously discover that by spinning they can drastically change their experience. Now, when I saw this it resonated with my own experience. I remember doing this as a child. So I’m interested in other people doing it. And then when I begin talking to experts on child behavior, and they tell me they’ve never seen this or there’s no literature on it, that’s the kind of thing that really catches my attention. This looks like something that’s pretty important. You know, what is it? Where does it come from? And why isn’t it studied? That was one of the pieces of evidence that I brought intoThe Natural Mind, arguing for an inborn drive to change consciousness.
In other words, we often do it ourselves, without resorting to drugs or substances.
Andrew Weil: Sure. We do it all the time. Drugs are just one way of satisfying that need. The advantage of drugs is that they provide these experiences immediately and there’s no requirement for work. The disadvantage of drugs is that when they wear off you haven’t learned anything. They don’t teach you how to do it the next time. If you rely on the drug as the way of changing consciousness, that leads to dependence on drugs. The other point I made inThe Natural Mind was that the experiences people have come from within, they come from the nervous system. The drug, or whatever other external thing is done, is a trigger or releaser of that innate experience.
From your early work on altered consciousness you turned to the study of the body’s natural defenses in your bookHealth and Healing. What motivated this transition?
Andrew Weil: I think this is a very logical flow from my earlier work with altered states of consciousness. As I said, the main point ofThe Natural Mind was that experiences that people have when they take mind-altering drugs come from within them. The high comes from the nervous system and the drug acts as a releaser.
The view that I developed about healing is very analogous to that. Healing comes from within. It can be elicited by treatments, but that healing actually originates within the body. That perspective was not present in medicine at all, at the time that I laid it out, although historically it had been.
Hippocrates, for example, told us to revere the healing power of nature. In that book,Health and Healing, I quoted a motto that I had come across at Harvard Medical School, probably from the previous century: “We dress the wound, God heals it.” This is a statement of that same thing, of the relationship between treatment and healing. At the time that I was writing about this, that view was completely missing from medicine. There was really no research on healing, no interest in healing. The word “healing” was not much used in medicine. I became very fascinated with healing and what it is and where it comes from. And my idea, which I have since developed and feel absolutely convinced of is that healing is a natural phenomenon, it’s something that’s rooted in nature, that’s inherent in the body. We are born with a healing system, with the capacity for self-repair, regeneration. And that the business of medicine is to facilitate that process.
That’s a delicate line.
Andrew Weil: It’s a very delicate line. But I think the majority of patients and physicians today still think that help has to come from outside if they get sick. And what I’ve tried to do is to build up people’s confidence about their own inner resources. I think that the best medicine works by facilitating or unblocking the healing process, or activating the healing process.
Can you give some examples?
Andrew Weil: Look at what happens when you cut your finger. You don’t have to go to a finger healer, you don’t have to pray for your finger to heal, all you have to do is make sure it’s clean and it will heal. That’s all the evidence you need that the body has the capacity to repair itself. I find it easier to talk with kids about the body’s healing system than I do with many of my colleagues. All you have to do with a kid is say, “Watch what happens when you get an owie,” and you can see that the body has that capability. Here’s an example that’s a little more complicated. If you have a patient with a bacterial pneumonia who’s acutely ill and you put them in the hospital and give them intravenous antibiotics and 48 hours later they’re out of danger, I think most people would interpret that as being that the antibiotic caused the cure. And what I’m asking people to do is to look at it a little differently. What the antibiotic does in that circumstance is to knock populations of germs down to a level where the immune system can take over and finish a job that it couldn’t do because it was overwhelmed. And to me, that’s a model for how our treatments work at their best. It’s not that they work directly to produce a cure, they work indirectly by impinging on innate mechanisms of healing.
Once again, it’s the limited use of drugs or conventional medicine to do what you need to do, and then rely on other things.
Andrew Weil: The first step that I take in assessing a patient is whether there is something there that demands immediate conventional intervention. You know, I think the greatest sin that you could make in this field is to miss the diagnosis of a condition for which conventional medicine works very well. So that’s the first thing, is to rule that out. If that’s not present, then you have a lot of latitude in experimenting with other methods. But even if you use the conventional methods, I think there are — it is often worth supporting the body in ways that can reduce the toxicity of those methods or increase their efficacy.
How did you first decide to study medicine?
Andrew Weil: I decided on medical school by default. I never saw myself being a physician. I wanted a medical education. I had an intuitive sense that a medical degree would be useful to me. I have always been a generalist and have really resisted being put in boxes and making decisions. And people were always pressing me to say what I was going to be when I grew up and I didn’t know. And in a way, going to medical school was a way of putting off a decision for four years, even though that may seem like a strange way to do it. I felt that medical school was a continuation of my general education. I wanted to know about human beings, I was interested in the relationship between human beings and nature, and the mind, and how the mind affected the body, and all those things. Also, on a practical level, it was during the Vietnam War, and it was a way of continuing my student deferment. I told the Admissions Committee at Harvard Medical School that I didn’t want to be a doctor, but that I wanted a medical education. They thought that was very cool. I think they’ve since learned to regret it.
That year, 1964, they took an unusually high percentage of students who weren’t sure they wanted to be doctors — people who were not science majors — and our class gave them an enormous amount of trouble. I think that was consistent with the times, but we were a very restive, independent group.
How did this play out, among those of you who were not traditional medical students?
Andrew Weil: Some students in the class dropped out. One dropped out and became an actor in a theater company in New York, for example. A very high percentage went into psychiatry. I was a member of a group in our second year who petitioned the dean to let us out of all classes. We said we would teach ourselves better and take any exams they wanted to give at the end of the year.
That was a pretty brash move.
Andrew Weil: It was brash, and we got away with it. There was a new dean who had just came in, he granted the petition and this group of people just absconded from classes. We had great fun and we passed all the exams at the end of the year.
How did you do that?
Andrew Weil: We found the faculty advisor and we had available to us the notes from the lectures. But our contention was that we would understand things better and much more efficiently if we focused on learning general principles rather than the way we were being taught, which was to be exposed to an enormous mass of detail. We felt we could always get the detail if we needed it, if we had a sense of the structure of our field of knowledge.
Did you work as a group?
Andrew Weil: Yes. It was a small group. It ended up being five students, finally, who did this.
What effect did that have on how you’ve chosen to do your work since?
Andrew Weil: I have my own ways of learning. And I never liked libraries, and I would like to get out of them quickly. So I developed very good skills at being able to go in and find exactly the information that I want and get out. And I feel very much that the way that I learned best, and I think the way that’s most efficient to teach, is to teach the underlying structure of a field and let students look up the details and specifics as they need them. And that’s not done in medicine today. There is a teaching of just a huge amount of detail.
Along with teaching the structure, you believe in experiential teaching. When you did your first published piece on nutmeg, that was experiential, right?
Andrew Weil: That was my undergraduate thesis, on the use of nutmeg as a narcotic. Most people only knew it as a spice, but it actually has a history of use as an intoxicant. At the time that I was doing this there was a considerable use of it in prisons by people who wanted drugs and didn’t have access to them. I was fascinated by the fact that a household spice could have a significant pharmacological effect, so I tried it myself. It was not very pleasant. I collected a lot of accounts by other people who had used it and researched the world’s literature to see what I could find out about it.
How did you initially come across that topic?
Andrew Weil: I believe I read it in a book. It might have been in Malcolm X’s autobiography, describing his use of nutmeg when he was in prison. I began asking around and I heard some other accounts of it. I asked my professors, and people in science, and nobody knew anything about it. Nobody thought that nutmeg was anything other than a spice, but it turns out to be a drug as well, and a moderately toxic one.
How do you hatch your theories, or get your ideas?
Andrew Weil: I cast a very wide net, using all my senses. I listen, and I look and I read and when I come across things that are interesting I follow them up and see what I can find out about them. If I come across something that doesn’t fit with accepted conceptions, it really catches my interest, it’s something that I want to know about.
As a result of your early research into intoxicants and addiction, what has happened in the field?
Andrew Weil: It’s been very gratifying to see how often that work is referred to by people working in addiction theory. I don’t think it has influenced public policy very much yet, but I meet a lot of people in the neurosciences and addiction research who say they were very influenced by that book. Many people have told me that it validated their own personal experiences. They felt that they were bizarre or unusual because they had these inner experiences they never told other people about. Reading that book made them realize for the first time that they had a connection on that level with other people. I feel very confident about that book. It’s just been reissued in a new edition, 26 years after it was first published.
Did you make changes?
Andrew Weil: I didn’t find the need to make changes. I wrote a little bit of a new preface to it. I talked about the fact that these ideas have really held up over time and I still consider them very useful. I think they explain a lot of addictive behavior. I also feel that if we’re going to change that kind of behavior in our culture, we have to begin by taking account of the fact that people have this great fascination with altered states of consciousness. We have to teach them to satisfy that need in other ways.
What prompted you to write that book?
Andrew Weil: I wrote that with a collaborator, Winifred Rosen, who’s an old friend and who had written children’s books. We had been approached by a number of parents who said that they didn’t know how to deal with their kids, who were asking questions about drugs. The only messages they were getting was, “don’t do it.” That wasn’t good enough; they wanted better information.
Our intent was to write a book that presented factual, unbiased information about all categories of drugs, both legal and illegal — medical, recreational, over-the-counter — that might affect the mind. So that young people could make up their own minds as to what they wanted to do about them.
Did you run this past children?
Andrew Weil: Yes, absolutely.
Your own?
Andrew Weil: At that point I did not have children. Over the years I have met many young people. I met one a couple of weeks ago who told me that reading that book as a young teenager had been very useful to him, and had gotten him through a very short period of drug experimentation. He no longer had the need to do that. Whereas he saw many of his contemporaries get caught up into very long and sometimes disastrous periods of drug experimentation.
You actually did your residency in Haight-Ashbury, didn’t you?
Andrew Weil: I did an internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, which serves the Haight-Ashbury district. I did that in 1968-’69, which was a very hot year politically and socially. There were all sorts of upheavals going on in the streets of San Francisco. It was an interesting time. I had made a conscious decision to do an internship at a very different kind of medical setting than I had been trained in. I had seen a lot of elite academic East Coast medicine and I wanted to work at a relatively non-academic hospital in a very different social and geographical setting, so that was very useful to me. I think the main thing that I came away with from that year was a strong sense that I would not be using very much of that kind of medicine in my practice. I didn’t want to take further specialization in it. I didn’t know what to do in its place, but I felt very strongly that I hadn’t learned very much about how to prevent illness, and I’d always felt that the main business of doctors should be to teach people how not to get sick. I also became very wary of the kinds of drugs that I was taught to use. I became very respectful of their toxicity.
When you started thinking about that, was that another period where you felt pretty alone?
Andrew Weil: Yes, because first of all, to drop out of medicine after one year of internship, there was very little professional or social support for that. I wanted to be licensed as a general practitioner, and at that time almost everyone that I knew went on to specialty training, so that was a big decision. Secondly, I did not hear other physicians questioning the risks of the methods that they were using. And the things that I was most interested in — mind/body interactions, for example, natural medicine, the use of plants in medicine — there was nobody doing those kinds of things. And so it was a very lonely path that I proceeded on when I left professional medicine.
Nevertheless, you felt comfortable actually making the break.
Andrew Weil: I did. But again, I felt really compelled to follow my own path. After I did that, I wroteThe Natural Mind, and then I went off to South American for about three and a half years on a fellowship and began looking at healing practices in other cultures, and testing some of these theories that I’d developed. When I came back, about 1974, I settled in Tucson, by sheer chance, my car broke down there. I fell in love with the desert and never left.
I began writing about other kinds of medicine. The University of Arizona College of Medicine found out that I was living there, and asked me if I would come in to give a lecture on marijuana, because the students were very interested in this and they had no one on the faculty that knew anything about it. I gave a one-hour lecture to first year medical students about marijuana, which was very popular. They then asked me if I’d come back and give another lecture on addiction in general, which I did.
I got into a pattern of giving these lectures every year, but I finally told the woman who had recruited me that this work on addiction and drugs was what I had done in the past. My current passion was really about new models of healing and alternative medicine. So I said, “That’s what I’d really like to talk to medical students about.”
Starting about 1979 or so, I began giving lectures on alternative and holistic medicine, which may have been the first lectures given in a medical school in this country on those subjects. Eventually those lectures became the basis for the bookHealth and Healing that was published in 1983 or ’84. That was the first book that I wrote about health, and it remains the theoretical philosophical foundation of my later thinking.
Are you finding a little bit of an opening?
Andrew Weil: Oh, it’s a big, wide opening. Medicine is in incredible crisis and transformation at the moment. The health care system in our country is self-destructing. One observer has said it is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Hospitals are going bankrupt, large academic medical centers — such as the one where I work at the University of Arizona — are laying off faculty. Doctors are miserable in the midst of this, because all the qualities of medicine that they went into for are disappearing. As this economic crisis has descended, the response has been a corporate take-over of medicine by people whose only interest is in getting whatever profit they can out of a sinking system. The fact is that medicine has become much too expensive. And the expense is directly related to its over-reliance and over-dependence on technology.
Technology is inherently expensive, there’s no way around that. As long as it was business as usual in medicine, it was possible for everyone to ignore all the kinds of issues that I’ve raised. But now that medicine is in desperate trouble and doctors are so unhappy, they have to take notice, because the market is moving in another direction. What patients want, and what doctors are able to provide, are becoming very divergent.
It is very clear now I think, including to deans of medical schools, that medical schools are no longer graduating physicians who are satisfying the needs of patients. Now what I would say patients want, based on my talking to lots and lots of patients, are that they want physicians who have the time and can take the time to sit down with them, listen to them, explain in a language that they can understand the nature of their problems. And go over with them their options for treatment, who won’t just push drugs and surgery as the only way of doing it. Who are at least conversant with nutritional influences on health. Who can answer intelligently questions about use of dietary supplements. Who are sensitive to mind/body interactions. Who will not laugh in your face when you bring up topics like Chinese medicine. Who will look at you as not just a physical body.
I think all of those are very reasonable requests, and that’s not how we’re training physicians today. This is one of the reasons why so many people are seeking out other kinds of practitioners. The estimates are that between 30 and 40 percent of Americans are now going to alternative practitioners. Significantly, most of them are not telling their regular doctors that they’re doing so. I think the reasons for that are obvious: people don’t want to be laughed at, and that has been the standard response. But now that medicine is in so much economic trouble, and with this consumer demand for something else having reached some kind of critical mass, it is no longer possible for physicians to ignore all this. As a result, in the past year especially, there has been enormous interest on the part of both institutions and individual physicians in things that they never paid attention to before.
I now direct a program called Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, which is the first of its kind in the world, that is actively training physicians, as well as trying to develop new models of medical education that can be used in other schools. In this past year, the University of California San Francisco Medical Center has announced a program of integrative medicine. Duke University is doing the same. The University of Minnesota is active as well. Jefferson in Philadelphia, Stanford in California. This is the beginning of a trend. I would predict with confidence that this is the future. By integrative medicine, I mean medicine that works from the premise that the body can heal itself if you give it a chance. It emphasizes prevention. It looks at people as more than just physical bodies and makes sensible use of other modalities of treatment.
I think this is really the future. I also think that if this trend succeeds, as I think it will, that one day we’ll be able to drop the word “integrative.” This will just be what medicine is and should always have been.
There is some reason for concern that while there are alternative modalities that are well known and well tested, there are some that are on the market that have not been so well tested.
Andrew Weil: All the systems of medicine that I’ve looked at are rich mixtures of wisdom and foolishness. That’s true of conventional medicine as well, by the way. There is a rather astonishing percentage of procedures used in conventional medicine that have never been rigorously tested. What we need to do is sort through all of this and to separate what’s useful and what’s true from what’s not. I don’t think there’s any system of medicine that has all the answers. I am a scientist. I’m very much in favor of scientific method. I’m in favor of testing, and determining first what’s harmful and eliminating that and warning people about that, and then trying to demonstrate the efficacy and cost efficacy of various approaches.
Would you be in favor of serious testing of health food and so on?
Andrew Weil: Of course. But the reason we don’t have good research in this area has a lot to do with how we’re training our physicians. For example, research in mind/body medicine is not great. The reason it’s not great is that the people who do medical research have come out of an educational system that has not made them realize the importance of mind/body interactions and the practical usefulness of knowing about them. So I keep coming back to the fact that unless we train a new generation of physicians, we’re going to be stuck with all these problems.
Do you get the sense that there is a new generation out there?
Andrew Weil: Yes. I think the demand for this kind of training is becoming overwhelming. We are really at the beginning of a genuine revolution and transformation of medicine. It’s also important to realize that this is consumer-driven at the moment, but institutions are finally responding to it. It’s happening all over the world, in different stages. It is not a fad; this is a genuine socio-cultural trend, with very deep historical and intellectual roots.
If it’s consumer-driven, could that lead to some possible complications?
Andrew Weil: If it remains only consumer-driven, that’s a problem. Unless there is a well thought out institutional response, I think it’s a problem. Here’s one example. If you’re a hospital facing bankruptcy, as many are, or if you are a managed care facility in an intensely competitive market, the economic incentives to cater to the consumer demand for alternative medicine are so overwhelming that you would be scrambling to provide services. But where are you going to get physicians to provide those services, since our medical schools are not graduating them?
One of my fears is that all this is happening too fast. A lot of programs are going to get set up, and we’ll see holistic clinics and alternative medicine programs that really aren’t well thought out. I think that would be bad for the development of the movement that I’d like to see.
Are there new frontiers that you’re interested in?
Andrew Weil: Well, based on the way that my career has gone, I would not rule out the possibility that five years from now I’ll be doing something completely different. For the moment it is very exciting to be involved in this wave of possibility of changing medicine and bringing it back into balance with nature, of expanding scientific horizons and paradigms to take account of observations and phenomena that have been seen as being beyond the pale.
Are there any things that you regret doing, or regret not having done yet?
Andrew Weil: I don’t think it’s useful to have regrets, frankly. I’ve done what I’ve done. I think that that was the right thing for me to do and here I am. I think I’ve made relatively good use of my talents and interests, and I will continue to try to do that.
When you took over the program at NIMH, was that just a bad fit?
Andrew Weil: Bad fit. This was 1969-’70. It was during a very difficult political year for the whole country. I was in a very sensitive area having to do with drug research. It was really not where I belonged, and I was happy to be out of there.
You have a relatively new book. This gets you into the pop culture area. Is that an insulting way to put it?
Andrew Weil: I see myself working on two fronts simultaneously. One is within the profession, towards professional development training, and the other is with consumers. I feel comfortable in both of those worlds. However, I think maintaining a balance between them is delicate. There are a lot of physicians out there who are very popular with consumers, who have no credibility with the profession. I think I’ve been able to walk in both worlds, and I will continue to try to do that. I feel that both of those worlds are necessary, because without the consumer movement none of this would be happening.
It is consumer demand which is forcing change within the medical profession right now. And to have that go in a responsible direction is important. And I think that my voice is very much listened to as a source of information that’s seen as being trustworthy, neutral. I’m not selling people things. I’m only selling information to the public. And I try to make that the best quality information that I can find.
So I feel comfortable operating in both of those worlds. Just on a practical level, theEight Weeks book was also written in response to demand, to people asking me to put all the practical information I had in one place. A lot of this is preventive, and I think that people who follow this kind of program, which is relatively easy to follow, are dramatically reducing their risks of a lot of the diseases that now consume a lot of the time of physicians, and a lot of our health care dollars.
Do people expect you to follow your own advice?
Andrew Weil: Yes, and I think that’s a reasonable expectation. The kind of lifestyle information that I’ve put inEight Weeks, that’s my lifestyle. That’s consistent with all of my earlier work. I’ve always drawn on my own experience, so I have experimented a lot with what works for me. I’ve tested that out on other people, and I’ve put that into the books.
Do you ever feel that it’s okay to sneak something…
Andrew Weil: Absolutely. All things in moderation, including moderation. One of the challenges for me is that, having become a public personality as a result of books and television programs, and the fact also that I’m fairly recognizable, I have to be aware that whatever I’m doing, people are watching. If I’m in an airport eating a frozen yogurt, a lot of people are going to come over and say, “Well, I guess it’s all right to eat frozen yogurt.”
Thank you for talking with us. It’s been a great pleasure.
You’re welcome.
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