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| navigate: home: magazine: spring/summer 1998: article | |
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Achieving a healthy balance: Andrew Weil’s philosophy on health care By S. William Hessert Jr. | ||||||
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Ask Andrew Weil to define health, and he’ll tell you that it involves much more than just the absence of disease. “Health is a state of balance in which there is a kind of inner resilience that allows you to move through the world without being harmed by things out there that are potentially harmful,” he explains. “If you are healthy, you can interact with germs without getting infections; you can interact with allergens without having allergic reactions; you can interact with carcinogens and not get cancer.” Weil is a worldwide leader in the integration of conventional western medicine and the exploding field of alternative medicine. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he teaches alternative medicine, mind/body interactions and medical botany at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He also founded the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, where he is training a new generation of physicians. Weil’s latest book, 8 Weeks to Optimum Health, encourages readers to make lifestyle changes by outlining a program of exercise, good diet and spiritual awareness. These changes, he says, enable people to live truly healthy lives. One reason Weil’s message has been received so favorably is that it is not radical. When Time named him one of its most influential people in America in 1997, the magazine wrote: “The extraordinary thing about Weil’s medical gospel, a liturgy of nutrition and lifestyle, is its ordinariness.” “A lot of what I’ve tried to do is really old fashioned,” he says. “What I’ve tried to do is bring medicine back on track to restore a balance that was lost this century in our enthusiasm for pathology.” Weil says part of the balance involves a marriage of the best ideas and practices of conventional and natural medicines—something he prefers to call integrative medicine, as opposed to alternative or complementary medicine. “Alternative medicine is a phrase that tends to suggest that it is a replacement for conventional medicine, which it is not,” Weil explains. “Complementary medicine sounds too polite, as if you have conventional medicine as the centerpiece, with all these little garnishes around the edge of the plate.” Weil says the function of the physician in a doctor/patient relationship should be to teach patients how not to get sick in the first place. “Conventional medicine doesn’t do a good job of stressing prevention,” he says. “A great number of the diseases today are diseases of lifestyle that could be avoided if people were taught how to exercise, how to reduce stress and how to use your mind.” Part of the problem, he says, is that physicians have not had the proper training to convey this message to their patients. “I’m a botanist as well [as a physician], and a lot of my teaching is in the area of plants,” he begins. “I don’t think doctors have heard a lot about that before—they don’t get that training in medical school. They aren’t trained in nutrition in medical school, for that matter, and they hear next to nothing about mind/body interactions.” Although Weil thinks conventional medicine has its place in keeping people healthy, he says it has its faults as well. “Most of the methods of conventional medicine are suppressive in nature,” he says. “It doesn’t get to the root of the disease problems, it simply suppresses them.” He also says that conventional medicine relies too much on drastic intervention. “Unless you are dealing with a crisis or a disease that involves vital organs, these methods tend to be overkill, and you may be subjecting yourself to a lot of harm—financial and physical—over the long run.” As for the future, Weil says continued integration of conventional and alternative practices is the key. “I would like to develop healing centers, which would be a hybrid between clinics and spas, under the direction of generalists using an integrated approach,” he says. Additionally, his program [in Integrative Medicine] will continue “to develop new models of medical education, as well as train a new generation of leaders that will be able to train others going through medical school.” an outreach program of the colleges of Medicine and Health and Human Development | |||||
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Speakers outline framework for complementary and alternative medicine
Today, there is growing public interest in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)—herbal remedies, homeopathy, biofeedback, acupuncture, meditation, massage therapy, to name a few.
To help health care professionals increase their awareness and understanding of these options, as well as other forces that are shaping medical research, practice and public policy, Penn State organized a series of events on the theme of The Future of American Medicine. The College of Health and Human Development and the College of Medicine sponsored the events, which were held at The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel.
Dr. David J. Hufford, professor of medical humanities and director of The Doctors Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine in the College of Medicine, and Dr. Bonnie O’Connor, assistant professor of community and preventive medicine, MCP–Hahnemann School of Medicine, talked about “The Framework of Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Historical, Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Aspects.” Their session was part of Future Directions in Health-based Teaching: A Conference on the Education of Professionals for the New Era of Integrative Medicine.
In discussing the history of CAM, Hufford pointed to Sylvester Graham’s (1794–1851) emphasis on the health benefits of whole grains and eating a vegetarian diet in the early 1800s and the common practices of drinking cranberry juice to treat urinary tract infections and eating yogurt to prevent yeast infections. These are examples of some of the things people have been doing for many years; however, medical research did not validate the effectiveness of these practices until the 1990s.
Hufford, who also is academic director of the Medical Ethnography Collection at The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, has taught and lectured for more than 20 years on spirituality and alternative and folk medicine. His work is grounded in the experience-centered study of belief and spirituality and addresses both theoretical issues and applications in health care.
O’Connor, a folklorist and ethnographer, is the author of Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicine and the Health Professions, published in 1995 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. |
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