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.