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Alternative Medicine Schools

Tucked into a leather wing chair in his office--a converted horse stable that still smells strongly of manure--Andrew Well, in khaki shorts, a rumpled cotton button-down and worn suede sandals, a pair of Rhodesian Ridgebacks at his feet, looks more like a friendly Deadhead than a millionaire medical practitioner. He is, in fact, a fusion of his former angry young mushroom-munching rebel and an urbane, self-possessed CEO. He lives on an 80-acre ranch in the Arizona desert yet dresses more like a groundskeeper than the master of the house. His advice has been sought by the Saudi royal family, and his last three hooks have topped The New York Times best-seller list, yet he appears unfazed by both his reputation as a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and the wealth and fame it's brought him.

During the three decades he's spent championing his own brand of health care, Well has gone from drug-culture shaman to alternative-health guru, earning pots of money and the sometimes-grudging respect of his peers along the way. And if we've been too hardheaded to buy into Well's prudent approach to healing until just lately, he's forgiven us. All that matters now, he says, is that integrative medicine, which combines both alternative and conventional approaches to maximize the body's natural healing powers, is catching on in a big way.

The rising cost of traditional health care is high on the list of reasons that alternative therapies, from acupuncture to herbal remedies, are on the cusp of mainstream acceptance. Americans may be forking over some $27 billion a year for alternative treatments. According to the journal Medical Care, an estimated 28.9 percent of adult Americans used at least one alternative therapy in 1999. And the health care community is taking notice. The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that most medical schools now offer courses in alternative medicine and increasing numbers of managed care organizations provide benefits for such therapies.

Integrative medicine is comforting to those of us reluctant to entirely abandon prescription reeds in favor of dietary supplements and meditation. And its emphasis on a true partnership between patient and practitioner, in which lifestyle issues such as diet, stress and relationships are considered, is also proving popular to a nation of people increasingly discontent with the five-minute physician consultation.

"In integrative medicine, we might give a patient with rheumatoid arthritis a whole package of things to do: a change in diet, a dietary supplement, mind-body technique, an herb, an exercise regimen," Well says. "Conventional medicine would just give her a prescription for steroids."

Singer Naomi Judd sought out Well after she was diagnosed with potentially fatal hepatitis C in 1991. Now healthy, Judd says Well walks the talk. He's "the real deal," and she knows because she looked in his fridge.

"I eat well; I grow a lot of my own food," says Weil. "I do some kind of physical activity every day, whether it's bicycling or walking or swimming. I do breathing exercises and some sitting meditation. I take a vitamin regimen of my own devising--no iron, lots of antioxidants," confides Weil. "I won't prescribe treatments I haven't tried."

Those treatments include guided imagery, acupuncture, herb therapy and even the science of Western medicine; Weil's is a Cuisinart approach to health and healing. "I look at everything out there and I say, 'Weil, this part is good, and this part is stupid.' If an idea or practice makes sense to me, I will recommend it--wherever it comes from."

People are drawn to Weil's simple, unthreatening principles. He espouses moderate, sometimes age-old preventative measures. Our grandmothers used some of Weil's favorite remedies--like cod-liver oil. He was touting the benefits of fish oils and omega-3 fatty acids long before the rest of us.

But Weil has his detractors, who point to his oft-told tales of recovery as proof of his quackery--like the story of the twenty-something fellow with prostatitis who Weil cured with a prescription of drinking water and a daily, self-prostatic massage. Or the teenager dying from a terminal blood disease who was cured by hypnosis. Or the young woman with an inflamed abdominal wall who Weil cured with a regimen of applied heat, ten glasses of water a day and meditation.

Weil's roll-your-own approach to health care has "led the charge to reform medicine by returning therapies that aren't pharmacentical or surgical to the mainstream," according to Lewis Mehl-Madrona, a colleague of Weil's and author of Coyote Healing: Miracles in Native Medicine. "His strength in fighting for a place for integrative medicine at the table makes him the King Arthur of the movement."

"Medicine should begin with prevention and self-healing," Weil says between sips of mineral water. "Then use the least invasive, least expensive and most natural methods possible. But our doctors are trained to use drastic measures far removed from nature, and not to work with the body's healing mechanisms. They tend to start with heavy interventions, which is one of the reasons for the economic crisis in health care."

As more doctors adopt Weil's approach to health care, he's morphed into a cottage industry. Equal parts spiritualist and physician, Weil is a doctor fur the Oprah generation; an herb-friendly, media-savvy scholar with a long list of self-help best sellers, a popular product line that offers healing wisdom via audiocassettes, CDs, videos and a monthly newsletter. He has a celebrity-doctor status second only to that of Dr. Phil. He's a frequent guest on Larry King Live, and has hosted his own PBS specials on health and healing. Visitors to Weil's Web site, which registers more than 2.5 million hits each month, are greeted by his warm basso and offered a heap of health tips, an advice column and the opportunity to shop for health products. Weil, the ultimate superstar physician, has even had a mushroom named in his honor.

Thirty-five years ago, Andrew Weil was just another Harvard Medical School graduate with a degree in botany. The only child of Philadelphia milliners, Weil spent his teenage years as a perpetual exchange student, circling the globe from Thailand to Greece and discovering that Western thinking was "just one way to approach reality." Fascinated by the psychedelic properties of certain plants, Weil conducted Harvard's first controlled experiments on humans with marijuana, then moved his cannabis studies to the National Institute of Mental Health, where he lasted one frustrating year. "They decided I was politically undesirable, and the views I had on marijuana were unacceptable," he recalls. "It was a completely unworkable relationship."

Weil then lived on a South Dakota Indian reservation, where he studied herbal medicine and ritual healing with a Lakota medicine man named Leonard Crow Dog. In his 1972 book The Natural Mind, Weil criticized American drug policy and revealed his fondness for states of altered consciousness induced by psychedelic drugs, hypnosis and meditation. The work earned him a cult following.

As founder and director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona's Health Sciences Center, Weil has set out to reform--rather than topple, as his critics often suggest--the medical establishment he once shunned. He insists that his philosophy, which in the '70s advocated something called "stoned thinking" (perception based on intuition), hasn't changed much in the past several decades; what has changed is his reception by colleagues and a public leery of HMOs and an impersonal medical industry.

"I've always said that the body is capable of healing itself," says Weil, "and that the majority of diseases that kill and disable people are diseases of lifestyle that could be minimized if people made better choices. The culture has finally caught up with me."

"People are finally listening to Andy because he's preaching common sense," says Linda Gain, a Weil fan who swears the good doctor's prescription for broccoli changed her life. "I was diagnosed with a digestive disorder a decade ago. I was sick, I couldn't eat, and no treatment was helping. I read what Andy wrote about the antioxidants in broccoli, so I started drinking filtered water and eating broccoli, and everything settled down."

For starters, he says, we should forget about being healthy all the time. "It's unrealistic to imagine that you can never be sick. Health is cyclical: It breaks down; it reforms. Being sick is part of being alive."

And being well is easier to achieve and maintain than we believe. Weil says that the key to better health is in taking positive control with simple tasks, like learning to prepare healthful food, buying fresh flowers, taking a stress-reducing "news fast" by avoiding newspapers for one day and spending time only with kind people. His prescriptions tend to be for lifestyle changes or items found at the greengrocer: Don't drink tap water. Take vitamins. Mend a broken relationship. Volunteer. Eat more fish. Eat more garlic. Breathe.

Weil's self-health prescriptions can also tackle bigger medical problems. Genital herpes got you down? Try munching red marine algae, which Weil says inhibits the herpes virus. Halitosis? Toothpaste containing tea-tree oil can help, as can chewing fennel seeds. Migraines a bother? Eliminate chocolate, coffee and sardines from your diet. If that doesn't work, make friends with your headache. Weil writes that migraines "can be a good excuse to drop routines, focus inwardly and let stress dissipate."

Weil's critics claim that his ways are much snake oil. They point repeatedly to his unproven therapies, which they say aren't based on any objective evidence or science. Weil's most devoted critic is former New England Journal of Medicine editor Arnold Relman, whose broadsides tend to hammer on Weil's refusal to deliver scientific evidence. "He's ambivalent, and he plays both sides of the street," Relman says of Weil. He's smart enough to know that when he's talking to scientists and physicians, he has to offer evidence based in medical science. But when he talks to the public, he talks in a weird way, as if be believes in miracles and healing at a distance and all sorts of clearly irrational modes of therapy. What's most irritating is that he pretends he doesn't know the difference."

Weil finds Relman's ire amusing. "He's a dinosaur," Weil says. "He's the essence of that old-style, paternalistic, authoritarian physician. He always says, 'Show me the evidence, and I'll believe you.' But when I do, he says, 'You call that evidence?' I can't win."

Let others gather medical proof, says Weil, who waves away requests for an explanation of how or why any of his treatments work. "I'm not a researcher, but I'm great at coming up with hypotheses to test. When you see a recovery from a serious illness that doesn't fit your model, it should be taken seriously. They're living examples of people who've had what you have and done very well. I may not know how to make the same cure happen in you, but at least I can show you it's possible."

He'd like to see the word anecdotal (as in anecdotal evidence) stricken from the medical vocabulary, because it trivializes what he calls "uncontrolled clinical observation" (meaning undocumented incidences of healing).

There are plenty such Weilisms to choose from. In his 1986 book Health and Healing, he writes, "Sickness is the manifestation of evil in the body." He has mentioned that he'd prescribe the club drug MDMA (commonly known as Ecstasy) as a painkiller, if it were legal. And then there's the matter of "stoned thinking," to which he still subscribes.

"In some ways, I regret having used the term 'stoned,' left over from my '60s-era life," Weil says. "It was meant to be provocative--but not about being intoxicated. It's about a different way of perceiving the world that relies on intuition, and using what you see in the world to develop a hypothesis. Of course, doctors are discouraged from using intuition-another unfortunate practice of Western medicine."

Despite his loud opinions about Western medicine and its practitioners, Weil claims a love of medical professionals and worries that doctors are as unsatisfied with the state of the medical industry as are patients. "The unhappiness of physicians is at an all-time high," he moans, "and significant numbers are leaving the profession--becoming pizza chefs or going into nonclinical medicine--because everything that made medicine satisfying is disappearing."

But ask Weil what will become of doctors once we all learn to heal ourselves, and be frowns and sighs. "I'd like to see more doctors become guides, teachers, lifestyle consultants, people who you can partner with to decide on treatment options," he says. "That's what patients want, but doctors aren't trained to provide that."

Weil knows this will change, because he has watched many of his own therapies gain mainstream acceptance in recent years. In the meantime, he's busy building a case against antiaging medicines, which he considers unnatural and harmful. He's excited about recent studies he's conducted in Okinawa, Japan, which has the largest centenarian population on earth. (He won't, how ever, discuss his work as of yet.)

"By now, it feels right when I get attacked from all sides," Weil says from a shadowy corner of his office. "It gives me a sense that I'm in the right place, somewhere between alternative medicine and Western. I call it the future of medicine, and you'll know it's finally arrived for good when we stop calling it integrative medicine and start calling it what it really is: good medicine."

ADVENTURES IN ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE PT spoke to six people who took the natural route. Their stories appear in the following pages.

The Fighter Carrie Putrello, 34, Just after receiving the last of her chemotherapy treatments, dancer Carrie Putrello performed in public. Every cancer patient she knew "was nouseous or had weight problems," she says. "But I felt good." When Putrello, the owner of a dance studio in Utica, New York, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma she went straight to the health-foad store and started reading up on cancer and diet She cut out sugar, white flour and processed foods and drank only water and tea. "I don"t even call it alternative [health]; it's just the way it should be:

A fighting attitude was vital to her recovery, as well. "I was mad. I thought, 'This is not going to happen--my kids are not going to grow up without a mother: "While in the bathtub each evening, Putrello would visualize cancer cells seeping out of her body. She has now been in remission for a year. She sees an acupuncturist regularly and has maintained her diet. "But when my birthday came, I wanted chocolate so much--and I had it."

The Skeptic Dan Marano, 33 In 1997, when doctors saw that his lymph glands were the size of tennis balls, Dan Marano was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, an autoimmune disorder. "There was no discussion of nutrition. Just a heavy regimen of steroids," Marano says of his surgeon's prescription. "I felt like a slab of meat on their cold table." He decided against steroids and consulted friends and books instead. While he had long mocked "new age" practices, he read Andrew Weils Spontaneous Healing and decided that "the premise rang true." A meeting with a naturopath doctor who asked about his general symptoms led to a plan: Marano started breathing and cardiovascular exercises, took grape-seed extract, cyrillic acid and hoxsey--a combination of plant extracts--and eliminated wheat, dairy and sugars from his diet

Three months later, the sarcoidosis was in remission, never to return. His doctors didn't attribute it to his regimen, figuring they caught the disease just before its remission, Morano, who lives in Ann Arbor, has since relaxed his dietary restrictions and hasn't completely sworn off Western medicine. "I advocate an integrated approach," he says.

The Dabbler Amy Lynch, 34 wasn't exactly a natural health skeptic, but she certainly wouldn't have known one alternative remedy from another. Still, Lynch needed an energy boost for her stepped-up yoga and pilates workout. So she visited a natural-health store.

While browsing for standard Vitamin C, she happened upon multiple vitamins that contained 28 essential nutrients. The labeling boasted "high-strength vitamin-B complex and beta carotene." Lynch, who works at an advertising firm in New York City, gave it a try. She started taking the vitamins six months ago and noticed changes within a week. "I was much more energetic, and it enhanced everything--even hair and skin." The U.S. Food and Drug Administration can't evaluate the safety or effectiveness of supplements, but such high-power vitamins have made people like Lynch believers. Today, she's more amenable to alternative remedies: "Now, I use liquid echinacea when I feel a cold or flu coming on."

The Devotee Dorothy Compeau, 50 In 1990, after weeks of suffering from tendonitis in her shoulder and no improvement with physical therapy, Dorothy Compeau visited a chiropractor. She was painfree within a year Compeau, a middle-school teacher in San Jose, California, continued the treatment for 10 years. "He was a homeopath. I felt like he was reading my mind, telling me things about myself I hadn't mentioned--but he was reading my body."

The chiropractor soon prescribed herbal remedies as he realigned her joints. "Some worked and some didn't," she says of his treatments for stress, allergies and other health concerns. "When he cured me of the shoulder ailment, he was my god ... but over the 10 years, there were times when I thought I was throwing $75 a week at him, and we had both lost the focus." In 2000, Compeau switched to a massage therapist who also practices acupuncture.

The Nonbeliever Josie Glausiusz, 39 "I had awful pain in my wrists, elbow and neck," says Josie Glausiusz of the repetitive-strain injuries she sustained from typing a few years ago. "I tried physical therapy and it only made it worse." A new physical therapist practiced an alternative treatment called myofascial release--a stretching of the underlying muscle and thin tissue that covers the body's organs--and convinced Glausiusz to try it. "I would lie down and she would place her hands an my chest and stomach and press lightly. After the first time, I said, "Oh, my goodness, the pain went away!'"

But after three months, even though the treatment soothed her, it didn't stop the pain. Glausiusz finally improved after she worked with a new physical therapist and gave up typing for six months--not an easy sacrifice in her job as an editor in New York. "It took patience for the pain to go away."

The Success Story Solimon Eid, 17 is a competitive swimmer who practically lives underwater. "I hope to go to University of California at Irvine on a swimming scholarship," the high school senior says. But when his allergies and asthma strike, "I can't really breathe. I have about a quarter of the breathing capacity of the other swimmers."

When Solimon's allergies surfaced six years ago, his mother, Sophia, gave him antihistamines. "But he would get very irritable," she says. She went to a large healthfood store in Irvine and found Sinus-Ease, a homeopathic remedy. Solimon has been taking it daily ever since.

"It's unbelievable," Solimon says." It makes me more awake and my sinus and throat clear" Sophia gives Solimon zinc and echinacea when he's sick and another daily supplement called Mind Care, which contains fish oil (such oils have been shown to help concentration), A goad thing because "he hates fish," according to Morn.

Profiles and additional research by Carlin Flora.

Robert Pela, author of Filthy: The Weird World of John Waters, is based in Phoenix and Bargemon, France. His work has appeared in Men's Fitness, Natural Health and on National Public Radio.

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