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The Transformative Power of Integrative Medicine

Andrew Weil, M.D., is an internationally recognized expert on Integrative Medicine, which combines the best therapies of conventional and alternative medicine. Dr. Weil’s lifelong study of medicinal herbs, mind-body interactions, and alternative medicine have made him one of the world’s most trusted authorities on unconventional medical treatments. Dr. Weil’s sensible, interdisciplinary medical perspective strikes a strong chord in many people. His recent books are all New York Times bestsellers and he has appeared on the cover of Time Magazine twice, in 1997 and again in 2005. USA Today said, “Clearly, Dr. Weil has hit a medical nerve,” and The New York Times Magazine said, “Dr Weil has arguably become America’s best-known doctor.”

Dr. Weil has long had a talent for blending the conventional with the unconventional. He received an undergraduate degree in botany from Harvard in 1964 and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1968. After completing a medical internship at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, he worked for a year with the National Institute of Mental Health. From 1971 to 1984, he was on the research staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum, where he conducted investigations into medicinal and psychoactive plants. Then, from 1971 to 1975, as a Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, Dr. Weil traveled throughout Central and South America, collecting information and specimens for this research. These explorations—where he not only studied plants but indigenous peoples, their medicine and pharmacology—were to have a profound effect on Dr. Weil’s medical career.

Dr. Weil has long been interested in altered states of consciousness and how the mind affects health—even before he began studying medicine. He has written extensively about this interest and about how his early psychedelic experiences profoundly influenced his views on medicine. Dr. Weil’s first book, The Natural Mind, was an investigation of drugs and higher consciousness. Because of this interest in altered states of consciousness, Dr. Weil has been honored by having a psychedelic mushroom named after him—Psilocybe weilii, which was discovered in 1995.

Dr. Weil is the author (or coauthor) of ten popular books, including The Marriage of the Sun and Moon, From Chocolate to Morphine, Health and Healing, Natural Health, Natural Medicine, Spontaneous Healing, Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, and Healthy Aging. He has also appeared in three videos featured on PBS: Spontaneous Healing, Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, and Healthy Aging.

Dr. Weil is currently the Director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine. He also holds appointments as Clinical Professor of Medicine, Professor of Public Health, and is the Lovell-Jones Professor of Integrative Rheumatology. A frequent guest on Larry King Live, Oprah, and The Today Show, Dr. Weil is the editorial director of DrWeil.com, and he publishes the popular newsletter Self Healing. To find out more about Dr. Weil’s work visit: www.drweil.com.

Dr. Weil lives near Tucson, Arizona. I conducted this interview with Dr. Weil on March 8, 2006. Dr. Weil appeared to be especially interested in the relationship between consciousness and health when we spoke. We talked about some of the most important lessons that physicians aren’t being taught in medical school, why it’s important for conventional Western medicine to be more open-minded about alternative medical treatments, and how the mind and spirituality effect health.

Q: What originally inspired your interest in medicine?

Dr. Weil: My father had wanted to go to medical school but was unable to finish college. It was during the depression. I had a G.P. family doctor who was an influence in that direction. I was interested in science and biology, and I kind of went to medical school by default, because I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had a sense that a medical degree would be useful to me, and I wanted a medical education, but I really never saw myself being a doctor.

Q: How did your early study of botany and the medicinal use of plants in South America affect your views of medicine?

Dr. Weil: That was a huge influence. I think that’s one of the luckiest choices I ever made. It really gave me grounding in natural science. It connected me to the plant world. It got me interested in ethnobotany and uses of plants in other cultures. It exposed me to Native American culture, both in North and South America. It gave me a perspective on drugs that I don’t think anyone else in Harvard Medical School had, and it really started me on a career interest in medicinal plants. I think it was one of the major influences in how I think about and practice medicine.

Q: What do you think are some of the biggest problems with modern medicine and what do you think needs to be done to help correct the situation?

Dr. Weil: I think it’s too reliant on technology. I think it’s overly reliant on very powerful pharmaceutical drugs without appreciating their potential for harm. I think it is very effective in many areas, but I think it’s very ineffective in large categories of disease that affect people. I think it’s doing a very poor job at prevention. I think it neglects, or underplays, the body’s potential for healing, which has been a major theme of my work and writing. And I think it’s become very divorced from the natural world.

Q: What do you think are some of the most important lessons about health that most physicians aren’t currently being taught in medical school?

Dr. Weil: I think the major one is that the body has a tremendous potential for self-regulation and for healing, and that’s where good medicine should start. You want to figure out how to make that happen or remove obstacles to it. I think that physicians are generally uneducated in the whole realm of lifestyle medicine—that is, how diet, exercise, mental states, and habits all affect health. I think they’re very uneducated in mind-body interactions and the spiritual dimension of human health. I think there’s almost a complete omission of education about nutrition, about use of dietary supplements, about use of botanicals, about many of these other systems of medicine, like Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, that are thousands of years old and very effective in many areas. So there are large areas, I think, of omission in conventional medical education.

Q: Why do you think it’s important for conventional Western medicine to be more open-minded about alternative medical treatments?

Dr. Weil: First of all, a huge number of patients are using these systems and doctors should know what their patients are doing—if only for the point of view that they might interact or impact the conventional treatments that they’re recommending. Secondly, there are a lot of ideas and treatments out there in the world of alternative medicine that are very useful that can compliment these deficiencies in conventional medicine. So that alone is, I think, a reason for doctors to at least be aware that these other systems and methods exist.

Q: Can you talk a little about Integrative Medicine and why you think it’s important?

Dr. Weil: I think Integrative Medicine is the way of the future. It makes sense. It’s increasingly what patients want. It’s what doctors want to practice. And I think the real potential of it—which is going to make it a mainstream phenomenon—is that it has the potential to lower healthcare costs by bringing lower cost treatments into the mainstream, while preserving outcomes or even improving them.

Q: Can you explain what you mean by the body’s “healing system”?

Dr. Weil: I think this is obvious if you watch the way wounds heal on the surface of the body. The body has a capacity to diagnose problems, to repair them, and to regenerate. This exists at every level of the organism, and it seems to me that good medicine should start with that principle, that the body has the ability to heal itself, and wants to get back to a state of health. And that your job as an outside practitioner is to help that process. So you’re not putting a cure into somebody. You are impacting, removing obstacles to, and allowing that natural healing power to work.

Q: What are some of the basic suggestions that you would make about diet?

Dr. Weil: First of all, the basic theory of my work is in the book Health and Healing. I think that appeared in 1983. In a lot of my practical books I’ve included information about diet. I have a whole book on that subject called Eating Well for Optimum Health, and in a cookbook I did with Rosie Daley, The Healthy Kitchen, there’s a lot of very concise information that people easily can get about basic dietary theory. In my recent book, Healthy Aging, I think this is organized most tightly. I talk about an anti-inflammatory diet, but this is really a diet for optimum health. It is modeled on the Mediterranean diet, which I think is the best template to use for designing a healthy diet.

Q: What do you think are some of the most important nutritional supplements that one should be taking?

Dr. Weil: I think that everyone should take a good multivitamin, multimineral supplement. I’ve been arguing that the government should provide one free to all school kids. I think that would do a lot to help correct micronutrient deficiencies, which are especially common in the poor population. I think it would improve school performance, and provide a lot of benefit. I think that people need to know how to read the label of a multivitamin bottle, so that they can tell whether it’s worth their money or not. I’ve given those rules in my book Healthy Aging, and they’re also available on my web site. There are some fairly simple things that you look at on the label that tell whether or not this is a good product. The quality of vitamin supplements varies enormously and there isn’t necessarily a correlation with price. And there are a lot of not well-designed products out there.

Q: What sort of recommendations would you make to someone looking to improve their memory and their cognitive performance?

Dr. Weil:  I think, first of all, to use antioxidants, to avoid smoking, and to look at some of the natural products out there which may be useful for that. There’s a dietary supplement called phosphatidylserine (PS), which looks useful for memory. There’s a product on the market called Juvenon, developed by Bruce Ames at Berkeley, which has two dietary supplements in it that looks useful. Ginkgo biloba may be helpful. But I think a major piece of advice that I would give people is that education seems very protective. The more education you have, I think, the better your memory is and the better it stays as you get older. I think there are some kinds of education that are particularly useful, like learning another language, so I urge people to make an effort to learn another language. You don’t have to master it; it’s just the act of trying to learn it that seems very useful. And there’s one other thing—it looks as if a lot of the neurodegenerative diseases begin as inflammatory processes. So again, following an anti-inflammatory diet, and using natural products that have anti-inflammatory effect. Turmeric looks especially powerful as a memory protectant.

Q: What sort of recommendations would you make to someone looking to improve their sexual performance?

Dr. Weil: I think, first of all, one needs to analyze what the problems are, and access whether there is a physical problem that’s interfering, or whether there is a psychological problem. So I would say to get help from an expert in the field. I think that Viagra and its relatives for men certainly are better than anything else that has been available throughout history. I think there are a number of natural products, like Asian ginseng, an Indian plant called ashwagandha, a plant from Mongolia called rhodiola, and arctic root. All of these have reputations as being sexual enhancers, especially for men. For women, I think the best thing we have is low-dose testosterone, and that needs to be given on prescription with some careful diagnosis, but it can be very useful.

Q: What do you think are some of the virtues of aging and why do you think that it’s important that we accept the aging process?

Dr. Weil: I think it’s important because it’s inevitable, and there’s nothing we can do about it—despite what the anti-aging people have to say. It’s an inevitable universal process. So I think it’s important to get with it, and accept it. I also think that, while aging brings difficulties and problems, there are some things that get better as you get older. I think that you accumulate wisdom. You develop more authority. I think that certain aspects of mental function get better, such as pattern recognition. I think that in cultures where aging is valued, and not devalued as it is here, old people look different. They’re valued as major cultural resources, and sources of information, experience, and wisdom. And people look up to them for that reason.

Q: What do you think are the primary causes of aging?

Dr. Weil:  Ultimately, I think it’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics—that disorder increases in systems, and that’s just the law of the universe. I think that on the cellular level that means the accumulation of errors in the DNA code. I think that one way you can look at living life is that it’s a perpetual struggle between oxidative stress and antioxidant defenses. The main source of oxidative stress is normal metabolism, and eventually oxidative stress wins, because of the fact that disorder increases. So I think that you can look on various levels as to why aging occurs. You can look at damage to DNA, damage to cell membranes, and oxidative damage, but I think the root cause is that this is a law of the universe.

Q: What do you think are currently some of the best ways to slow down the aging process and age more gracefully with greater health?

Dr. Weil: My goal is not to slow down the aging process; it’s to reduce the risk, and delay the onset of age-related diseases. I don’t think it is necessary to get sick as you get older. One of the things that I worry about with the anti-aging movement is that if you’re obsessed with slowing down or reversing the aging process it distracts you from that other goal, which is, I think, the really important one. And to do that, I think, it means attending to all aspects of lifestyle. It means learning the principles of good eating, good physical activity, ways of neutralizing stress, using natural products to enhance health, and knowing what you can do on the mental level to protect your memory and other mental functions. So I think it’s working in all aspects of lifestyle, and I think we have a lot of that information out there about how to reduce the risk of age-related disease.

Q: What role do you see the mind and consciousness playing in the health of the body?

Dr. Weil: I think it’s huge. This is an area that I’ve been interested in, I think, since I was a teenager—long before I went to medical school—and a lot of my early work was with altered states of consciousness and psychoactive drugs. I reported a lot of things that I saw about how physiology changed drastically with changes in consciousness. I just reviewed a paper from Japan; one of the authors is a doctor I know. This is a group of people looking at how emotional states affect the genome. They have shown, for example, that laughter can actually effect gene expression in patients with type 2 diabetes. Now that’s really interesting stuff, and I think that this is the type of research that is generally not looked at here. I think that our mental states—our states of consciousness—have a profound influence on our bodies, and even our genes. And I think they have a lot to do with how we age.

Q: What role do you think that spirituality plays in health?

Dr. Weil: Again, I think, large, but it’s hard to define spirituality. For me, I make a very sharp distinction between spirituality and religion. Religion is really about institutions, and for me spirituality is about the nonphysical, and how to access that and incorporate it into life. In Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, I gave a lot of suggestions in each week about things that people can do to improve or raise spiritual energy, and they are things that at first many people might not associate with spirituality. But they were recommendations like having fresh flowers in your living space and listening to pieces of music that elevate your mood. Some of the other suggestions included spending more time with people in whose company you feel more optimistic and better, and spending time in nature. I think that I would put all of these in the realm of spiritual health.

Q: When I interviewed Larry Dossey he told me about research that showed evidence for the health benefits of remote healing. What do you think of the studies done with remote healing that show health benefits from prayer?

Dr. Weil: I don’t know what to make of them. I think that’s really frontier stuff, fringy stuff, and I’m certainly open to those possibilities. I’m willing to believe anything, but then I really want to see evidence for it. And I think that the evidence that has been collected so far for these effects, at least in the experiments where people don’t know that these interventions are being done, that that’s such a challenge to the conventional model, that there really has to be very solid evidence for it. I’m open-minded, but unconvinced at the moment.

Q: How have psychedelics affected your perspective on medicine, and what sort of therapeutic potential do you think they have?

Dr. Weil: I think they’ve been a very profound influence. I used them a lot when I was younger. I think that they made me very much aware, first of all, of the profound influence of consciousness on health. I have published and described one of the experiences that I had that was very dramatic, and this was seized upon by some networks that put it all out there. This was that I had become cured of a lifelong cat allergy. If a cat touched me, I would get hives. If a cat licked me, I would get hives and my eyes would swell. So I always avoided them.

Then, one day when I was twenty-eight, I took LSD with some friends. It was a perfect day. I was in a wonderful state of mind, feeling totally relaxed and at one with everything, and a cat jumped into my lap. My immediate reaction was to be defensive, and then I instantly thought, well, here I’m in this state, why don’t I try to pet the cat. So I petted the cat and I had no allergic reaction. I spent a lot of time with it, and I’ve never had an allergic reaction to a cat since.

So, to me, that’s an example of a potential of those drugs, and if they were legally available I think that I would use them as teaching tools to show people that you can change chronic patterns of illness, because even if you aren’t cured of an illness the psychedelic may show you that it’s possible. Another experience that I’ve written about with psychedelics is when I was learning yoga, and had a lot of difficulty with some positions. The one I had the most trouble with was “the plow,” where you lie on your back and try to touch your toes behind your head. I could get to about a foot off the floor and I had horrible pain in my neck. I had worked at this for weeks and made no progress. I was on the point of giving up; just thinking I was too old. I was twenty-eight then. I thought I was too old, that my body was too stiff.

Again, an experience with a psychedelic, where I felt completely happy and elastic, showed me otherwise. I noticed that my body felt very free. So I tried that posture, and I thought I had around a foot left to go when my feet touched the floor and there was no pain. I kept raising and lowering them, and it was just delightful. The next day when I tried to do it. I could get to a foot within the floor and I had horrible pain in my neck—but there was a difference. I now knew that it was possible, and I think that’s a model for how these drugs can work.

Psychedelics can show you possibilities. They don’t give you information about how to maintain the experiences, and if you try to rely on the drug for the experience, the drug stops working after a time. But, in this case, just having seen that it was possible, I was motivated to keep working at it, and in a few weeks I was able to do it. I don’t think I would have pursued that if I hadn’t seen the possibility. So I think they’re potentially tremendous teaching tools about mind-body interactions and states of consciousness.

Q: What are some of the new medical treatments that you foresee coming along in the near future?

Dr. Weil: First of all, there are all the high-tech ones, which are great. I think these are fabulous possibilities. Now, whether they will become practical realities or not, I don’t know. I would say that a huge area is genomic medicine—the possibility of being able to individualize treatment to patients, including pharmaceutical drug treatment. Just as an example, there’s a lot controversy now about soy and its ability to protect from breast cancer. Some of this seems to have to do with how women metabolize soy. Some of them are able to metabolize one of the phytoestrogens of soy to a protective compound and other women are not. If you could identify those women who could do it, then those are the ones you would want to get to eat soy regularly. The other ones, maybe not.

With cigarettes there are a lot of people, especially Asians, who are able to smoke like chimneys all their life and have no increased risk of lung cancer. They have different enzyme systems. It would be nice to identify that group, and then there are some people to whom you could say, you must never smoke because you’re at high risk. And to other people we could say, if you want to do it, maybe do it, although you might still be at risk for other problems from it. And the same way with how people respond to pharmaceutical drugs and surgical treatments. So I think that there is this promise out there on the horizon of customized medicine, based on people’s genetic makeup. At the moment it’s promise; we don’t have the practical techniques to do it. The other question is that some of these new techniques may be too expensive to deliver to everybody, so it’ll be medicine for the affluent. Anyway, I think there’s a lot of stuff like that out there on the horizon that looks great.

Q: What are your views on euthanasia?

Dr. Weil: I think it’s great that this issue, at least, has been raised to the level of public discussion. I don’t think it’s appropriate for doctors to be involved in it, although I think patients should be able to discuss the issue with doctors. I think that for people with overwhelming diseases, for whom life has become really difficult, that they should have that choice, and that there should be mechanisms provided for helping them with that. I think the experience in the Netherlands is very positive, and I don’t see abuses of it there. So I would like a society where that was possible.

Q: What are you currently working on?

Dr. Weil: I’m not interested in taking on another book for awhile. My main focus is developing curriculum for the program in Integrative Medicine, which, eventually, I hope will be in all medical schools, and really increasing the numbers of doctors out there that we’ve graduated. We now have over three hundred. My focus is really on having that be a new generation of physicians and nurse practitioners who get it, and have this kind of knowledge that’s been omitted from medical education. I think that’s my main focus. I’m interested in doing more work in radio and television. I may want to write something for kids. I’m very interested in trying to effect public health policy, especially on nutrition, and I’m also looking at ways of reforming the healthcare system. So, all that stuff. And having more leisure time for me is also high on my agenda.

David Jay Brown is the author of four volumes of interviews with leading-edge thinkers, Mavericks of the Mind, Voices from the Edge, Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, and Mavericks of Medicine. (Mavericks of Medicine will be published by Smart Publications as a book in late 2006.) He is also the author of two science fiction novels, Brainchild and Virus. David holds a master’s degree in psychobiology from New York University, and was responsible for the California-based research in two of British biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s bestselling books on unexplained phenomena in science: Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At. To find out more about David’s work visit his award-winning web site: www.mavericksofthemind.com