Andrew Weil Interview (page: 5 / 7) Integrative Medicine	Print Interview

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 wrote The 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 book Health 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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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