Dr. Herb Andrew Weil Hits Big With A New Book That Promotes Medical Alternatives

Fans lined up before Dr. Andrew Weil’s autograph table at Auntie’s Bookstore, bringing him their books, their pens, their irritable bowels.

They came to meet Weil, a Harvard-educated M.D. and an author whose time has apparently arrived. Weil blends standard and alternative medicine into an approach he calls “integrative medicine.” But the title of his book features a word with ageless, irresistible appeal: healing.

“That’s the big missing piece in medicine today,” Weil said.

After Weil’s new book, “Spontaneous Healing,” appeared on ABC’s “PrimeTime Live” on May 17, sales skyrocketed. The day of the broadcast, bookstore chains reported sales of 50 to 80 copies per store. The day after the broadcast, these stores reported sales of more than 1,000 copies. The book has been on the New York Times best-seller list ever since.

In the book, Weil (pronounced “While”) weaves advice about acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine and guided imagery with conventional medical advice.

He explains his convictions about the workings of the body’s internal healing system, which, in healthy people, appears to rapidly repair and heal damage to cells and tissue. He believes doctors should base their thinking on this system, not on the current disease model.

“If you look at the names of our socalled National Institutes of Health, these are the national institutes of diseases and body parts,” Weil told his audience at Auntie’s. “Where is the National Institute of Health and Healing? That should be the centerpiece of the campus with the largest budget.”

Mainstream medicine may not embrace Weil’s ideas anytime soon. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Arnold Relman, editor in chief emeritus of The New England Journal of Medicine, said the notion of spontaneous healing is “hardly news.”

“Dr. Weil,” he wrote, “radiates such enthusiasm and bonhomie that one feels almost churlish in criticizing him. Yet the sad fact is that this is simply another one of those shoddy books selling unsubstantiated claims of miraculous healing. There really is no such thing as ‘alternative’ medicine - only medicine that has been proved to work and medicine that has not.”

(Weil argues that mainstream researchers generally refuse to study alternative approaches; physicians who do, he says, are looked down upon by their colleagues as “flaky.”)

Dr. Abraham Verghese, a professor of medicine at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center, reviewed Weil’s book for The New York Times more favorably.

“Writing a book about spontaneous healing is a risky business for any physician, but Dr. Weil makes his case carefully and clearly; he does not proselytize and doesn’t seem wedded to a particular dogma, Western or Eastern, only to the get-the-patient-better philosophy,” Verghese wrote.

At 53, Weil is balding and white-haired, perhaps more Jerry Garcia than Marcus Welby. He exudes both ‘60s-era revolutionary zeal and warmth.

At Auntie’s last week, Weil described a newspaper column called Ask Andy he read as a kid. Now, he joked, he’s practically a walking Ask Andy himself.

That night he fielded questions about prostate cancer, sinus infections, and, yes, irritable bowels.

“Irritable bowel syndrome is a classic case of a condition you should not take to regular medicine,” he said. Instead, his advice included hypnotherapy, peppermint oil and elimination of dairy products.

Joy Attwood lined up at Auntie’s, a copy of Weil’s book in her hand and knots of pain in her leg muscles. By her side was her husband, Dr. Wayne Attwood, who told her that since she’s a diabetic, she’s likely to have the pain in her legs the rest of her life.

Weil recommended Attwood take powdered ginger, with meals, twice a day. She wrote his advice on the inside of her palm.

“I’d be happy to try anything,” she said.

Weil said he often finds doctors and their families willing to listen.

“I think I’m unique in being able to maintain credibility in both worlds,” Weil said. “I don’t hold any punches when I criticize conventional medicine, but I am also very quick to recognize medical nonsense in the alternative world as well.”

Weil, director of the University of Arizona’s Program in Integrative Medicine, is starting the country’s first post-graduate fellowship program to train medical students in alternative approaches. The first students in the Arizona program will enroll in June 1996.

“I think a lot of physicians want to know how they can begin practicing this way,” Weil said. “They recognize this is what patients want. Their frustration is that they haven’t been trained in it.”

Weil’s training began with an undergraduate major in botany. After graduation from Harvard Medical School and an internship at the Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center in San Francisco, Weil in 1969 decided against starting a standard medical practice.

“If I were sick,” he said, “I wouldn’t want done to me what I had been taught to do to other people.”

Instead, he worked as a research associate in ethnopharmacology at the Harvard Botanical Museum. A fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, he traveled throughout the world, researching the healing treatments of foreign shamans.

In 1973 Weil settled near Tucson, where he began to study American healers and to write articles on natural medicine.

In 1983, he started a private practice in Tucson. That year, his book, “Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind Altering Drugs” (Houghton Mifflin) was published.

In 1990, his book “Natural Health, Natural Medicine,” appeared. It became a popular guide to alternative medicine.

Through the years, Weil has researched several approaches, including traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture and homeopathy.

Through his friend, Dr. Marilyn Ream, a family practice physician at Group Health in Spokane, he discovered the power of guided imagery.

In his book, Weil describes the success of Ream’s treatment in relieving Weil’s wife’s back pain during pregnancy, and later, a condition of his own, a bacterial skin infection he contracted from a hot tub.

As Weil explored various alternatives, he found that all of them, even methods that appeared to contradict science, worked some of the time.

“That made me think that there’s more to treatment than meets the eye,” Weil said.

He came to believe that medical treatments work by somehow activating the body’s healing system, and that a person’s belief in the treatment is a powerful determinant in whether the person gets well. In fact, he theorizes, doctors’ “medical pessimism” actually may ward off healing.

Today, Weil is convinced that standard medicine is the best answer for certain situations: trauma, acute bacterial infections, and medical and surgical emergencies. He believes it’s much less effective in dealing with viral infections, chronic degenerative disease, allergy and autoimmune disorders, many cancers and mental illness.

The heavy, expensive artillery of standard medicine should be reserved for the most serious 15 to 20 percent of all cases, Weil said.

Others, he said, can be treated less expensively and more efficiently through alternative treatments.

Sheer economics, combined with consumer demand, he said, will push medicine in this direction.

“I’m a big fan of the health-care crisis,” Weil said.

Weil’s book recounts several stories of healing in which people with lymphoma, breast cancer and scleroderma somehow managed to “spontaneously heal.”

He wrote of 86-year-old Oliver Walston of Pemberville, Ohio, who endured rheumatoid arthritis from his mid-30s until he was 64.

One evening Walston climbed into a clean pair of pajamas, fresh from the clothesline where his wife had hung them to dry.

That night, he got up to go to the bathroom and felt a sting on the inside of his left knee. A honeybee had flown into his pajamas during the day.

Two days later his bee sting was swollen and sore, but the arthritis swelling in that knee had begun to recede. Soon, Walston stopped taking all his medications.

Within five or six weeks, the arthritis had disappeared from all of his joints. That was 22 years ago. Walston hasn’t been troubled by arthritis since.

It turns out, Weil writes, that bee venom and a treatment called beesting therapy have been used for rheumatoid arthritis. But that doesn’t fully explain why a single bee sting would reverse the course of Walston’s disease.

The answer appears to lie in Weil’s conception of the body’s internal healing system. DNA research demonstrates that these molecules have an ability to repair damage and heal, and Weil believes that this ability exists at all levels throughout the body.

Serious threats to this system, such as cancer, may overwhelm or block the system’s ability to function. Spontaneous healing, which Weil believes occurred in Walston, is much more rare in serious cases.

Nonetheless, Weil embraces his own brand of medical optimism.

“Keep searching,” he said, “The possibility is always there that healing can happen.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: The doctor’s prescription Dr. Andrew Weil recommends a number of herbal tonics: Gingseng for increasing energy, vitality and sexual vigor, for improving skin and muscle tone and resisting stress. Garlic for lowering blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood fats, protecting against cardiovascular disease, acting as a natural antibiotic and enhancing the activity of the immune system. Ginger for improving digestion, treating nausea and motion sickness, protecting against ulcers and promoting healing and immunity. Green tea for lowering cholesterol, improving lipid metabolism, and protecting against cancer and heart disease.