You say your book Health and Healing has been the philosophical foundation of your work. In what sense?
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 of The 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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