Dr. Andrew Weil is America's best-known advocate for Integrative Medicine - the integration of traditional and alternative remedies

Dr. Andrew Weil and Integrative Medicine

Dr. Andrew Weil is America's best-known advocate for Integrative Medicine - the integration of traditional and alternative remedies.

Educated in traditional Western theory at Harvard Medical School, he is the founder of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center and teaches mind-body and integrative medicine and medical botany at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Dr. Andrew Weil has worked for the National Institute of Mental Health and for fifteen years was a research associate in ethnopharmacology at the Harvard Botanical Museum.

As a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, he has traveled extensively throughout the world collecting information about medicinal plants and healing.

He is the founder of the Center for Integrative Medicine in Tucson, Arizona, and director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona.

A crisis in medicine has been reached, as evidenced by the fact that many hospitals, particularly teaching hospitals are going bankrupt. Large areas are being left without hospitals, forcing patients to travel great distances for care. Additionally, managed care's control over how health care workers practice has caused job satisfaction to plummet.

The root of these problems is not insurance companies or even government policy, but the intrusion of technology between patients and doctors, as well as it's high cost.

With insurance companies now undermining the role of doctors, "the nature of medicine has run into an economic wall." The cause? An uncritical embrace of technology and subsequent reliance on it. "Medicine wed itself to technology ... this allowed for advances in understanding disease, but brought us to an impasse where we can no longer pay for the costs of giving treatment dependent on this technology."

At the same time, more people - 30 to 40 percent - are dissatisfied and frustrated with the present system, and are turning toward a movement that began in the '60s and represents the present cycle of alternative medicine.

The single greatest omission of the medical establishment is its distance or fear of nature: "Rather than focusing on prevention, conventional medicine has become devoted to the suppression or counter- action of illness in ways which sometimes mask the problem or potentially render it worse."

One has merely to look at the medical institution's lopsided emphasis on disease: All our National Institutes of Health are in fact ones of diseases and body parts. They are "not working from the principle that the body can heal itself if given a chance." Modern medicine is so focused on form and structure that often the functional aspects of the human organism are lost.

For example, historically, the Chinese did not believe in doing autopsies, much of their medicine was based on treatment of problems with out knowing specific functions of organs.

When it came to the immune system, the Chinese believed the body had a "defensive sphere of function" without knowing specifically what was involved in the defense process. Yet for centuries, Chinese medicine has used certain mushrooms to treat diseases in that sphere.

Today those mushrooms have been shown to stimulate immune function. In contrast, because Western physicians found organs they did not understand - the tonsils, appendix and thymus - they called them useless and removed them. The story not only illustrates the arrogance of Western medicine toward what it does not understand, it also explains why physicians have difficulty focusing on healing instead of disease.

"The healing system is about function. It doesn't coincide with structural systems."

What we need is a system of health care that follows Hypocrites two best known directives: Do no harm and respect the healing power of nature. That means natural therapies such as herbs, nutritional changes, and exercise become central to medicine as well as the use of manipulation, acupuncture, hypnosis, homeopathy and essentially anything else that might be helpful and will do no harm - system called integrative medicine.

Change is beginning to happen and consumers, dissatisfied with the treatment they have had, are at the forefront. 30-40% of people report seeing alternative practitioners, a number that represents billions of dollars. That's enough money to make medical institutions take notice.

Many are adding more holistic care options. "They're desperate. They can't afford to lose their clientele." Even the traditionally conservative National Institute of Health has added an office of alternative medicine.

Meanwhile, Washington state recently passed a measure that requires insurance companies to pay for alternative treatment. Now, more than a dozen states have similar measures in the works.

"The Western scientific paradigm does not allow for the non-physical causation of physical events. This is a paradigm that has to change."

Treatment should work with the body, not against it. "What is needed is the least invasive treatment with the maximal impact." Accordingly, any good medical practice must begin with the assumption that the body can heal itself.

A crippling limitation of conventional medicine and medical theory has been the Cartesian idea that mind and body are separate and don't interact. "It has left us unable to make sense of hypnosis ... and of placebo responses which are consistently relegated to the category of things that are unimportant and messy. It has also made us unable to see that an enormous number of diseases that we deal with really have as their root causes the services of the mental realm."

Up to 80 percent of illnesses are related to lifestyle and are treatable with alternative medicine. Nonetheless, "mainstream medicine is relentlessly moving in the direction of trying to eliminate the mind as a variable in all conditions of health and illness."

With respect to medicine and healing, notice the difference of approach to infectious disease between Eastern and Western medicine.

There are two problems with the focus of the West on identifying external agents of harm and then developing technological weapons against them: "The first is that the weapons tend to backfire and cause direct harm.

And the second and greater concern is that when you deal with things that way, you may influence the evolution of organisms in a direction that produces worse results than you had to begin with." The Eastern approach, by contrast, is to focus on body defenses and to try to find ways of increasing the resistance of the organism.

At present, a major thrust of my work is to develop new models of integrated medicine for training physicians, based on some crucial elements to being a good physician: developing and using intuition (which is the basis of all diagnosis), knowledge of a history of medicine that takes into account Chinese medicine and other kinds of healing traditions, and knowledge of nutrition, botanical medicine, and mind-body relations.

We need new models for doctor/patient/nurse relations and doctors need be trained to better communicate with patients and should themselves model healthy living for them.

It is the notion of medicine as technological science that has to change and be replaced with a concept of medicine as an art.

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