Andrew Weil

Andrew Thomas Weil (born June 8, 1942) is an American author and physician, who established the field of integrative medicine which attempts to integrate alternative and conventional medicine. Weil is the author of several best-selling books and operates a website and monthly newsletter promoting general health and healthy aging. He is the founder and program director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine (formerly the Program in Integrative Medicine), which he started in 1994 at the University of Arizona.^[1] He is frequently criticised for his promotion of alternative medicine,^[2][3][4] drug use and the potential conflicts of interest this raises in relation to his business dealings.^[5][6][7]

Andrew Weil was born to parents of German and Ukrainian descent. His parents owned a millinery store.^[8] He attended Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. As an undergraduate, Weil majored in botany and wrote his thesis on the narcotic properties of nutmeg,^[9] and also served as an editor of the Harvard Crimson and the Harvard Lampoon.^[10] After medical school, Weil did not seek residency. He completed a medical internship at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and subsequently worked for a year with the National Institute of Mental Health. From 1971-1974, he traveled throughout South America as a fellow for the Institute of Current World Affairs.^[11] He published his first book, The Natural Mind, in 1972. Weil has since written or co-written nine books, and was a regular contributor to High Times magazine from 1975 to 1983.^[12] His early works explored altered states of consciousness, but he has since expanded his scope to encompass healthy lifestyles and health care in general. In the last ten years, Weil has focused much of his work on the health concerns of older Americans. His book, Healthy Aging, looks at growing older from a physical, social and cross-cultural perspective, and emphasizes that aging cannot be reversed, but can be accompanied by good health, "serenity, wisdom, and its own kind of power and grace". His book, Why our Health Matters, is focused on health care reform.

Philosophy

Weil's general view is that mainstream and alternative medicine are complementary approaches that should be utilized in conjunction with one another (what he terms integrative medicine). Specifically, he maintains that mainstream medicine is well-suited to crisis intervention, whereas alternative medicine is best utilized for prevention and health maintenance.^{[citation needed]} He promotes integrative medicine as a combination of both approaches. Nutrition, exercise, and stress reduction are emphasized in almost all of Weil's health works.

Because the nature of integrative medicine is to attempt to merge evidence based medicine with alternative medicine techniques, as well as partially focusing treatment on the "spiritual", it is not without controversy and regarded by many medical experts as pseudoscience. Accordingly, it falls into the same category of criticisms as much of alternative medicine does.^[3][13]

Dr. Arnold Relman, editor in chief emeritus of The New England Journal of Medicine wrote:

There are not two kinds of medicine, one conventional and the other unconventional, that can be practiced jointly in a new kind of 'integrative medicine.' Nor, as Andrew Weil and his friends also would have us believe, are there two kinds of thinking, or two ways to find out which treatments work and which do not. In the best kind of medical practice, all proposed treatments must be tested objectively. In the end, there will only be treatments that pass that test and those that do not, those that are proven worthwhile and those that are not. Can there be any reasonable 'alternative'?^[2]

Speaking of government funding studies of integrating alternative medicine techniques into the mainstream, Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale School of Medicine wrote that it "is used to lend an appearance of legitimacy to treatments that are not legitimate." Dr. Marcia Angell, former executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine says, "It's a new name for snake oil."^[3]

Weil has acknowledged the influence of many individuals, philosophical and spiritual ideas, and techniques on his approach to alternative medicine. Among the individuals who strongly influenced Weil's professional and personal life is the late osteopath Robert C. Fulford, who specialized in cranial manipulation.^[14][15]

Weil has previously expressed opposition to the war on drugs, citing the benefits of many banned plants. He promotes the medical use of whole-plants as a less problematic approach to treatment than synthetic pharmaceuticals. Weil has also written about the healing properties of medicinal mushrooms and Psilocybin (the active component in "magic mushrooms") in several of his books.

Honors

• Forbes on-line magazine wrote: "Dr. Weil, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, is one of the most widely known and respected alternative medicine gurus. For five years, he has offered straightforward tips and advice on achieving wellness through natural means and educating the public on alternative therapies" and listed his web site in their Best of the Web Directory in the "Alternative Medicine" category,^[16] listing it as one of the three "Best of the Web" picks in that category.^[17]
• Weil appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1997 and 2005. Time Magazine also named him one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997 and one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2005. He received the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences from Smithsonian Associates in 2005.
• Mycologists Dr. Gustan Guzman, Fidel Tapia, and Paul Stamets honored Weil by naming a newly discovered mushroom, Psilocybe weilii, in 1995.
• Weil was honored by the Institute for Health and Healing in San Francisco as their 2006 Pioneer in Integrative Medicine.
• He was inducted into the Academy of Achievement in 1998.^[1]
• Weil was honored by the New York Open Center [2] in 2004 as having made "extraordinary contributions to public awareness of integrative and complementary medicine."

Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine (AzCIM)

In 1994, Weil founded the Program in Integrative Medicine (PIM) at University Medical Center and the University of Arizona in Tucson.^{[citation needed]} It offers residential and research fellowship programs and operates an outpatient clinic according to Weil's principles; emphasizing prevention over treatment and focusing on nutrition, botanical medicines and mind-body interventions to complement conventional synthetic drug and surgery protocols. It also operates an annual Nutrition and Health Conference and a Botanical Medicine conference.^{[citation needed]} As of 2008, more than 450 physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners had completed the program. Weil says the expense associated with running PIM, reportedly $3 million annually, led him to agree to lend his name to commercial products to provide steady revenue for this and other research efforts in line with his philosophy.^{[citation needed]}

In April 2008, the Arizona Board of Regents recognized the Program as a Center of Excellence and renamed it the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine.^{[citation needed]} Since the founding of the University of Arizona program, academic instruction in integrative medicine has grown rapidly.^{[citation needed]} There are now 42 academic medical centers that offer integrative medicine programs, including the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School and Georgetown, Duke and Columbia Universities.^{[citation needed]}

Diet advocacy

Weil is a proponent of a diet rich in organic fruits and vegetables and regular consumption of fish. He is also an outspoken critic of partially hydrogenated oils. In an interview on Larry King Live, Weil claimed that sugar, starch, refined carbohydrates, and trans-fats are more dangerous to the human body than saturated fats. Weil is also an advocate for certain medicinal mushrooms in a daily diet.[3]

Timothy Leary and Harvard

In Fall 1960 Weil was an 18-year-old Harvard freshman. He was already interested in doing research on mind-altering drugs. He learned of the Harvard Psilocybin Project that was being run by two Harvard professors: Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass). Weil interviewed with Leary and Alpert to become part of their project, but was turned away because he was an undergraduate. Leary and Alpert had made an agreement with Harvard that they would not use undergraduates in their project. After this, Weil and other undergraduates managed to procure mescaline, and they did their own experiments with it. Weil later stopped taking the drugs (at that time).^[18]

In May 1963, Weil was an editor of The Harvard Crimson. Leary and Alpert were continuing their activities amidst various controversies, including a criminal investigation of the project by Massachusetts authorities. The Harvard administration wanted to remove Alpert, and Weil was helping them to gather evidence against him. At this time Weil wrote an exposé article on Leary and Alpert for the Crimson.^[19] After the article was published, Alpert was fired for giving psychedelics to an undergraduate. Leary, who was already in Mexico when the article was published, was fired for "leaving Cambridge and his classes without permission."^[20][21]

Weil also wrote a negative article on the Harvard drug scandal for the November 1963 issue of Look magazine.^[22]

About five years later, Weil came to regret his actions with these articles. He reconciled his differences with Leary, and attempted to do the same with Alpert.^[23]

Drug use

Weil has been very open about his own experimental and recreational use of numerous drugs including narcotics and mind-altering substances:

"I think I've tried about every drug in Chocolate to Morphine, although there may be one or two there that I haven't. I wouldn't write about any I didn't try, or if I did I would say that I hadn't tried it. There's a lot of things I've never come back for a second try for and there's some things I've used for varying periods and then stopped using."^[24]

He believes that there's no such thing as good drugs and bad drugs,^[24] and would recommend that his patients use Ecstasy (MDMA) if it were legal:

"In an exclusive interview with myprimetime.com, author and medical expert Dr. Andrew Weil explained that he would welcome the drug Ecstasy (MDMA) to his repertoire of patient recommendations if the drug was lawful."^[25]

He considers current methods and attitudes aimed at stopping "the drug problem" to be themselves problematic:

"I often have the suspicion that everything that we do in the name of stopping the drug problem is the drug problem. It's not just the laws but the whole mentality that sees drugs as the problem and tries to fight them. By doing that I think we've made it all worse."^[24]

Weil endorsed children's book about marijuana called "It's Just a Plant," writing, "A delightful book... a glimpse of what enlightened drug education could be." ^[26]

Criticisms

Some have criticized Weil for promoting unverified beliefs. Weil's rejection of some aspects of evidence-based medicine and promotion of alternative medicine practices that are not verifiably efficacious has been criticized by noted physicians such as Arnold S. Relman in his 1998 article "A Trip to Stonesville: Some Notes on Andrew Weil".^[2] Weil has also promoted food products such as fruit and nut bars by combining his personal brand with Arran Stephens' Nature's Path brand.^[5]

Barry L. Beyerstein, PhD, Simon Fraser University, criticizes aspects of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), asserting that "As a major New Age industry, CAM shares the movement's magical world-view. On advocating emotional criteria for truth over criteria based on empirical data and logic, New Age medical gurus such as Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra have convinced many that 'anything goes,'" later stating that "By denigrating science, these detractors have enlarged the potential following for magical and pseudoscientific health product." ^[4] Simon Singh echoes this criticism going as far as saying that while Weil promotes some good things like exercise and less smoking that "much of his advice is nonsense".^[27]

In a debate between Dr. Weil and Dr. Steven Knope of Tucson, Arizona, televised on public television affiliate KUAT-TV, Knope is critical of Weil for what he considers irresponsible advocacy of untested treatments by Weil.^[28]

Regarding his journalism for Time Magazine (see publications, below), The Center for Science in the Public Interest pointed out that in one Time magazine column by Weil, he touts the benefits of fish oil supplements. CSPI stated, "The column was sparked by a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that fish oil supplements did not reduce the risk of serious abnormal heart rhythms. The article failed to disclose that Dr. Weil sells his own brand of fish oil supplements on his website.".^[7] Healthwyze.org points out an additional conflict of interest with Time Magazine, stating, "Time Magazine featured Dr. Weil not once, but twice on its cover, for issues which were largely dedicated to him. One of the articles confessed that Time Magazine was a partner corporation of Time New Media, which was bargaining with Weil for an affiliation with his website." ^[6]

In 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to a company associated with Weil (Weil Lifestyle LLC) as a package of urgent measures to protect consumers from products that, without approval or authorization by FDA, claimed to diagnose, mitigate, prevent, treat or cure H1N1 Flu Virus in people. Weil Lifestyle had made several implicit claims in its marketing literature that certain products could help ward off the virus.^[29]

Books and publications

Weil's writings span over thirty years and include the following ten books:

• The Natural Mind: An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness (1972, rev. 2004)
• Marriage of Sun and Moon: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Consciousness (1980, rev. 2004)
• Health and Healing (1983, rev. 2004)
• with Winifred Rosen, 1983 (2004), From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything you need to know about mind-altering drugs, Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0-618-48379-9 
• Spontaneous Healing (1995)
• Natural Health, Natural Medicine (1995, rev. 2004)
• 8 Weeks to Optimum Health (1997, rev. 2006)
• Eating Well for Optimum Health (2000)
• Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing, audio CD, Sounds True (2000)
• The Healthy Kitchen with Rosie Daley (2002)
• Healthy Aging (2005)
• Why Our Health Matters (September 2009)
• Spontaneous Happiness (2011)

He has written forewords for books by Paul Stamets, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Tolly Burkan, and Wade Davis, among others.

Weil occasionally writes articles for Time Magazine and Huffington Post.^[30][31]

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Andrew Weil

• Andrew Weil official website
• Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, formerly the Program in Integrative Medicine, University of Arizona