Spontaneous healing is not a rare event, it's not a miracle or a lucky occurrence, it's
a common fact of biology due to the operations of the healing system that each of us is born
with.
The power to heal is within you.
Dr. Andrew Weil is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and internationally acclaimed author.
He is one of the most skilled and important leaders in the field of health, healing and
integrative medicine.
He wrote the number one bestseller, Spontaneous Healing, and his books have been translated
in over 20 languages.
He is the founder of the Center for Integrative Medicine and lives with his family just outside
of Tucson.
Thank you.
Hello.
I'm going to be talking to you about spontaneous healing, the body's wonderful ability to repair
itself and keep you healthy throughout your life.
The most important idea I want you to take away is that the body can heal itself.
It can do so because it has a healing system and I think it's very important for all of
us and certainly for doctors and patients to begin to use those concepts and incorporate
them in our lives.
At every level of biological organization, from DNA on up to the most complex organisms,
it's possible to see that all living things have the ability to self-diagnose, to identify
areas of injury and illness, to remove damaged structure, to regenerate intact structure.
Your body can do these things.
It can do them because it has a healing system.
Now before I go any further, let me define two key words.
Health literally means wholeness and healing means making whole and both of these words
come from an old Anglo-Saxon root that has also given us the word holy.
I think it's interesting to think about what the connection is here.
Why are wholes holy?
I'll give to you what I think is the reason.
Wholes are complete and perfect and so they reflect the perfection of the divine.
And I think that perfect wholes also manifest a special quality, the quality of balance
that's at once mysterious and also divine.
And for me, the essence of health is an inner kind of balance.
And I'll give you a couple of images of what I mean by that.
One is of a spinning gyroscope that retains its stability no matter how you tilt it.
Another that I like to use is of a child's knockdown toy with a weighted bottom.
You can push it over and it bounces back up to the center when you let go.
You might hold it down for a while, but as soon as you let the hold go, it comes back
up to center.
I think the essence of health is that kind of inner resilience or springiness or bounciness.
And if you have that quality, you can move through life and interact with germs and not
get infections.
You can interact with allergens and not have allergic reactions.
You can interact with carcinogens and not develop cancer.
That is the essential quality of being healthy.
And that's a quality that you can cultivate because that aspect of health is influenced
by your choices of how you live.
There are many influences on it.
It has to do with how you eat, how you exercise or don't exercise, how you handle stress,
how you use your mind.
There are many influences that you have power over to control.
So you can increase that quality that keeps you healthy.
Now you might have noticed that most medical doctors that you meet don't talk this way.
And I would say that the most frequent question that I get asked in my travels, especially
by talk show hosts, is at what point in your career did you convert?
And it gives me the impression that most people can't imagine that a physician could come
to these ideas except by way of some kind of personal health crisis.
I have never had a personal health crisis.
I've always been relatively healthy.
I've always known how to take care of myself, which is the strategy I recommend to you as
well.
And as far as I can remember, I always thought this way.
For example, I have a lifelong interest in plants, something I got from my mother, which
she got from her mother.
That eventually led me to be a botany major as an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s.
I cannot tell you how unusual it is to meet doctors who majored in botany.
I can count on the fingers of one hand those that I've met, and none of them uses any of
their botanical training in their medical practice.
As a result of my botanical interests, I have a long career in the study of medicinal plants,
and I've come to use them a lot in my own practice.
And I would estimate that for every prescription that I hand out for a pharmaceutical drug,
I probably give 40 or 50 recommendations for botanicals.
And in the years that I've been doing that at that rate, I have never seen a single serious
adverse reaction to any plant product that I've given to a patient.
And that is the great advantage of that kind of medicine.
The risk of toxicity is so much less because you're using preparations that are dilute.
And I also can't tell you how sad it makes me that botany and medicine have become such
distant fields.
I'm really a rare animal to have connection with both of these.
Not only are there not physicians trained in botany, but there's no communication that
exists anymore between these areas.
In fact, when I was studying botany, the last remaining link between botany and the health
sciences was a field called pharmacognosy, which was taught in schools of pharmacy.
It was about the recognition of new drugs, mostly from plant sources.
And this was really the living heart of pharmacy.
About five years ago, that course was dropped as a required subject in all American schools
of pharmacy.
And that really, you know, this is all representative of how far medicine has moved us away from
nature in this century.
And to me, that is the fundamental split that has developed, which ultimately is the root
of the healthcare crisis that we have today.
I'll come back and talk to you about that point later.
As far back as I can remember, I was interested in mind-body interactions.
I remember coming across a book on hypnosis when I was a kid, and it just fascinated me
and led me eventually to take a course for physicians at Columbia University in medical
hypnosis, which was one of the most interesting courses that I ever took.
When I finished my basic clinical training, I made a decision that I did not want to do
further training in standard medicine, and I did that for two reasons.
One of them was emotional and one philosophical.
The emotional reason was simply that I felt that if I got sick, I wouldn't want done to
me what I had been taught to do to other people.
So it didn't feel right to do it to other people.
The philosophical reason was that it seemed that a great deal of what I had learned were
methods that suppressed illness or counteracted the symptoms of illness, but didn't really
get to the root of disease processes and change them.
And also, I had learned nothing about prevention.
It's always seemed to me that the main business of doctors should be to teach people how not
to get sick in the first place, and that treatment should be secondary.
I hadn't learned anything about that.
I could spend the whole time talking to you about what I see as the suppressive, counteractive
nature of medicine, but I'll just quickly give you an idea of how you can find this
out for yourself.
If you open the physician's desk reference, this huge publication of the pharmaceutical
industry that doctors consult when they want to know how to prescribe drugs, there's a
section in blue at the beginning in which drugs are listed by category.
It's very interesting to run your finger down the names of categories of drugs that we use
in medicine today and see how many of them begin with the prefix anti.
We use anti-anxiety drugs, anti-spasmodics, anti-histamines.
This is the nature of our medicine.
It's anti-medicine, and there are two problems with this.
First of all, let me say that as a short-term strategy, if you're dealing with life-threatening
symptoms, of course you want to counteract them.
So these methods are appropriate for the management of crises and emergencies.
But if you rely on them as long-term strategies for dealing with illness, you run into two
kinds of problems.
The first is direct toxicity, because these treatments by nature are strong and they're
productive of harm.
And this to me is the great black mark against standard medicine today, the unacceptable
amount of toxicity that it creates by its reliance, almost exclusive reliance for treatments
on these very strong pharmaceutical agents.
This is such a common problem that I would say to you that any dedicated patient sooner
or later is going to have an adverse drug reaction, and that can be as minor as hives
and as major as death and permanent disability, and this happens every day in every medical
setting in the world.
But there's another problem with this kind of suppressive treatment that's more subtle
and less obvious, and that is if your main method of trying to deal with illness is to
counteract it, you may unwittingly strengthen the disease process.
And the reason for this is that there is a physiological principle, very well known since
at least the 1920s or 30s, called homeostasis.
This word comes from Greek roots that means the same place.
The body seeks the same place.
I mean, this is, again, like the spinning gyroscope.
If you push against the body with an outside force, it's going to push back against it
in an effort to reach equilibrium.
So if you remove the outside force, it's going to overshoot in that direction.
And all of you who have experienced this, anyone who has ever used a nose spray to open
a clogged nose has seen this principle at work.
Your nose is stuffed up, you can't breathe, you spray a chemical into it, and magically
you can breathe.
But four hours or eight hours later, depending on which chemical you've used, the drug wears
off and your nose is clogged worse than it was before.
And if you take another dose of the drug at that point, it's very easy to get into a dependent
cycle in which you can't breathe without the drug.
This is the same problem that develops when we treat anxiety with Valium, when we treat
ulcers and stomach problems with using acid-suppressive drugs, with using drugs that lower blood pressure.
These are all counteractive, and this is the bulk of our medicine today.
So I was quite sure when I finished my training that I didn't want to do this, but I didn't
know what to do in its place.
So for 11 years I didn't practice medicine, and I traveled around the world looking at
healing practices in other cultures, and in this time I visited naturopaths, shamans,
faith healers, herbalists, chiropractors, osteopaths, a whole range of practitioners.
And just to summarize what I saw, I found that all of these methods worked some of the
time.
You know, even methods that seemed to me to be based on ideas that were not scientific
or that seemed to me weak sometimes produced real cures in individual cases, and that seemed
very interesting to me.
And also I noticed that every system of medicine fails to work some of the time, even when
it seems as if it's an impeccable system intellectually and it's perfectly matched to a particular
problem.
This made me think that there's more to treatment than meets the eye, and in particular that
belief in treatment is a crucial factor in determining whether it works or not.
And I'm not talking here just about beliefs of patients, but especially beliefs of practitioners
because I think the beliefs of patients tend to follow beliefs of practitioners.
And this is a whole dimension about which I learned nothing in medical school since
our conventional system of medicine virtually ignores the whole aspect of the mind and the
impact of the mind on the body and on the healing system.
I'm quite convinced that the mind is one of the great influences on the body's healing
system.
Let me just tell you about one practitioner I worked with during this period who became
a teacher of mine.
This was ironic because after chasing around to lots of exotic locations in the Amazon
and Africa, the best teacher that I found turned out to be in my backyard in Tucson
and he'd been there all along and I didn't know about him.
He was an old osteopath in his 70s at the time that I met him named Robert Fulford who
used pure manipulation as a way of dealing with illness.
And he was a healer in the guise of an osteopathic physician.
He taught me, among other things, about the tremendous importance of breath.
He felt that breath was a master key to good health.
He himself, by the way, was spectacularly healthy.
He is, I should say.
He's now in his early 90s and is still actively teaching and a wonderful example of health.
And once I asked him, Dr. Fulford, what's your own secret of good health?
And he said, I'll show you.
And he went, and I've never seen anyone's chest expand so large and for so long.
And that was his answer to my question.
He had, for example, remarkable success with curing recurrent ear infections in kids.
And his method was to do manipulation, mostly on the tailbone, on the sacrum, to free up
restricted breathing.
And he said that the root cause of ear infections was that kids didn't breathe fully and that
breathing was the mechanical force that pumps the lymphatic circulation.
And if that's not working right, there is poor fluid drainage from the head and neck.
And in these stagnant fluid conditions that build up, including in the middle ear, bacteria
breed.
And he said you can wipe out the bacteria all you want with antibiotics, but unless
you change that underlying situation, they're going to come back, which is certainly our
experience.
He would work on these kids one time.
And you could see when they got up off the table that their chests were expanding more
fully and they never got another ear infection.
He also taught me that the body wants to be healthy, that there is a natural tendency
to come back to that point of health, and that all you need to do is remove obstacles
or give little nudges in the right direction, but you can take advantage of that natural
force.
You know, that is really the healing power of nature.
Again, an idea that's not at all fashionable in conventional medicine today.
Seeing him and seeing healing happen in many people made me think that that was a major
focus that I wanted to look at.
So I began systematically collecting cases of healing in real people.
People in my own practice, people that I'd heard about, I interviewed them.
And I've now collected a lot of these stories, some of which I've presented in my books.
I'll just tell you a few quick ones that are interesting.
One was that I reported a young woman, 19 at the time that this happened, who was living
on Maui, and developed strange bruising on her body, which was misdiagnosed for a couple
of weeks as anemia.
But then blood tests looked very alarming, and they did a bone marrow biopsy, which
showed that her bone marrow had stopped functioning and had only 2 percent of the normal cells.
This is a condition called aplastic anemia, which is usually considered fatal.
Certainly when it's in the range of 2 percent of cells left, that's considered no chance
to live.
She was air evacuated to a medical center in Southern California, given massive doses
of steroids and immunosuppressive drugs to try to stop the destructive process in the
marrow.
That didn't work, and her only option was a bone marrow transplant, which she tried
to avoid, but she had no choice.
She was critically ill.
Her brother matched as a donor.
She had two bone marrow transplants, which failed to take.
She was told there was nothing else they could do.
They tried to keep her health up with transfusions.
She got serum hepatitis from the transfusions, and essentially was sent home to die.
She said that she always knew there was a way back to health.
She began experimenting with a variety of healers, hands-on healers, psychic healers,
all sorts of things, and after several weeks of their treatments, her blood counts began
to come back up, which astonished the doctors.
She persisted in this.
One healer prescribed a very bizarre diet for her.
At six months, her bone marrow started to function again, and when it did, the doctors
presented her at an international conference on aplastic anemia, because this was such
a rare event.
She was finally, obviously she was going to get better, but the doctors told her she would
never have children because her reproductive system had been destroyed by the treatments
that they'd given her.
It's now 20 years later, she has four natural, healthy children.
She's a star athlete who had put most of us to shame.
She studied and became a naturopathic physician.
I mean, this is an example of what I mean by spontaneous healing.
I mean, it's wonderful, wonderful to see this.
There are many cases of these, and my contention is that these are not uncommon, that in fact,
healing is the rule rather than the exception.
You know, many of us, when we think about healing, we all want to hear about cancer
remission and these dramatic odd things, but if you look at the whole spectrum of illness,
if you look at all the headaches and back pains and stomach upsets, healing is the rule.
It's what happens most commonly.
Most diseases end by themselves.
They end by themselves because the body's healing system is capable of handling them,
and I also think that the most important work of the healing system is not to produce these
spectacular cures.
The most important work of the healing system is to keep you in relatively good states of
health most of the time despite all of the forces and pressures that are out there that
are pushing you in the direction of illness.
You know, if you start to think about everything that can go wrong in the body, it's pretty
amazing that we're healthy at all.
You know, we are living in a sea of microorganisms, all of which, many of which have the capacity
to do us in.
We are exposed to an increasing assault by toxins of all sorts.
There are toxins in our food, in our water, in our air.
There are forms of toxic energy that are in our environment, which is worth learning about.
We are exposed to emotional storms that many of us have little control over.
Time is passing, and our body is aging and deteriorating, and yet, and yet, most of us
are mostly healthy most of the time.
You know, this is something that you're born with.
It's in you.
It's an innate system.
I use the word spontaneous in connection with healing to draw attention to the fact that
this is an intrinsic process.
It's innate.
It's something that you're born with.
It's part of you.
There are things that you can do to protect that function and to enhance it, which I'll
tell you about.
And I think it's very important for all of us to learn about that, because this in a
way is your most precious resource.
You know, the ordinary fact is that most of us are relatively healthy most of the time,
and that, that is what the healing system really does for you.
We'll return with Dr. Andrew Weill in Spontaneous Healing in a few moments.
Whenever you cut your finger, you have a great opportunity to observe the workings of the
healing system, and that's something you can see on the surface of your body, but that
same kind of process goes on throughout.
And yet, I find it easier to talk with children about the concept of a healing system than
with most of my medical colleagues.
If a kid gets an owie, it's very easy to say, watch what happens over the next few days
and plant the seed of the concept that the body has the ability to repair itself.
But I find when I try to talk to many medical doctors about the healing system, it's very
easy for them to dismiss that as more new age fluff.
You know, this is not new age fluff.
This is science.
And it's possible to observe the workings of the healing system, and in fact, many aspects
of it are even known in medical science, but the concept is missing, so it's not put together.
One of the examples that I like to use is the process of DNA repair.
The DNA molecule, and this is really just a big molecule, it's the interface between
living and nonliving matter, and it's common to all life.
This huge molecule has very complicated functions to perform.
It has to transfer the information that it codes to daughter cells, to the protein manufacturing
machinery of cells.
In the process of doing this, there are many things that can go wrong with DNA.
There can be mistakes made in copying.
The molecule itself is very vulnerable to damage when it's in an uncoiled, exposed state
so that the information can be read.
It can be damaged by radiation, it can be damaged by certain forms of chemicals that
cause mutations.
Living things can't take chances with this.
It's a disaster if the genetic information is copied incorrectly.
So the DNA molecule has evolved mechanisms for identifying problems and repairing itself.
And this is carried out by enzymes.
Enzymes are protein molecules that function.
You can think of them as kind of the hands that carry out the instructions of DNA.
Enzyme molecules cause chemical reactions to happen faster.
There's a whole class of enzymes called DNA repair enzymes made by the DNA molecule.
And they all have different functions.
For example, if in the course of copying a strand of DNA is broken, there is one repair
enzyme whose job is to go along the DNA molecule and see if there's a break somewhere.
It just constantly runs along the molecule looking for breaks.
If it finds a break, it snips it on one side.
Then there's another enzyme that comes around looking for gaps.
And if it finds a gap, it uses the other strand to reproduce the missing part.
And then there's another enzyme that comes along and pastes the ends in.
So this is a kind of cut and paste that goes on at a molecular level.
And this is happening in every cell of your body all the time.
And I like this example because, as I say, this is going on at a level way below where
there's an immune system, way below where there's mind as far as we know.
This is just a molecule.
And in that molecule, there is the inherent capacity to diagnose problems, to remove damaged
structure, to regenerate intact structure, to heal.
It's there.
And that same potential as you go up in levels of biological organization is there.
Now I'm interested in why this concept is missing from medicine and why doctors have
such a hard time with it.
In my medical training, I almost never heard the word healing used.
I heard it used in the phrase wound healing in my first year histology course, and that
was it.
I never heard about healing.
In fact, I learned very little about health for that matter.
And I think that one of the valid criticisms of standard medicine is that it's got a tremendously
lopsided emphasis on disease.
There are many ways of looking at seeing the disease focus of medicine, but I'll just give
you one that I find amusing.
If you look at our so-called National Institutes of Health and look at the names of the individual
institutes that make up this vast complex in Washington, these don't look to me like
Institutes of Health.
These are National Institutes of Diseases and Body Parts.
There's the National Cancer Institute, National Heart Institute.
Where is the National Institute of Health and Healing?
That should be the centerpiece of the whole show.
What could be more important to study than how the body heals itself?
That should be what medicine works with.
That's the heart of it.
And as I say, this concept is missing.
There's I think another reason why medical doctors have problems here.
The healing system is a functional system of the body.
It's not a structural system.
And in Western science, we are very focused on material structure.
We don't think functionally.
I can't stand up here and show you a chart of the healing system in the way that I can
show you a chart of the circulatory system or the digestive system.
It's not a set of associated structures.
It's a function that's distributed throughout the body and makes use of all of the structural
systems.
It makes use of the immune system and the circulatory system and the nervous system.
But it's none of those.
It's possible to think of the body differently.
And one way you can see that is looking at traditional Chinese medicine, which evolved
along functional lines, probably for historical and cultural reasons.
One reason is that in traditional Chinese culture, it was unthinkable to cut open a
dead human body.
So autopsies were not performed.
So Chinese medical science, which I think is a true science, very different from Western
science, but it's a science, evolved in the absence of detailed knowledge of the internal
structure of the human body.
And instead, Chinese thinkers developed a philosophy of functional relationships.
They identified spheres of function in the human body and the ways that they related
to each other.
Now, let me show you a very concrete example of how these different ways of thinking lead
to very different ways of interacting with human beings.
One of the functions that Chinese scientists identified long ago was defense.
They observed that the body had a defensive sphere of function that was concerned with
protecting itself.
They didn't know anything about the immune system as we know it.
They didn't know what tonsils did and adenoids did and the appendix did.
But they knew that the body had a defensive sphere of function.
In the West, until remarkably recently, we had no idea what those organs did.
And in fact, when I was in medical school in the late 1960s, I was still taught that
the tonsils and adenoids were functionless organs.
And when I was a kid growing up in Philadelphia in the late 40s, early 50s, it was impossible
to make it to adolescence with your tonsils and adenoids.
Because these were thought of as useless structures and that gave surgeons license to take them
out at the drop of a hat.
Right through the 19, probably as late as the 1970s, maybe into the 1980s, it was not
uncommon for patients going into hospitals for abdominal surgery, for hysterectomies
or gallbladder removals, to have their appendixes taken out without their knowledge and not
find it out until they got the hospital bill and saw that an appendectomy had been done.
And this was done as a preventive measure because this was another useless structure,
a vestigial structure.
We did the same thing to the thymus gland behind the breastbone, which we now know is
the master gland of the immune system.
This was considered useless.
And there was an amazing episode in American medical history when doctors invented a disease
that every child had called thymic hypertrophy, meaning the thymus is too large, which was
treatable by shooting x-rays at it to cause it to shrink.
And lots of parents, educated people, were persuaded to bring their children in for courses
of x-ray therapy to shrink the thymus.
One of the things that this did was cause an enormously increased risk of thyroid cancer
when these kids got into their 30s.
At any rate, I think this is a very interesting thing to look at.
I mean, while in the West, we were systematically destroying these organs because we had no
idea of their function.
And what a leap to say that because you don't understand the function of something, therefore
it's useless, so let's take it out.
At the same time that this was going on in our lifetimes, in the East, there had been
this clear concept in place of a defensive sphere of function.
And Chinese medical scientists systematically explored the natural world to find substances
that enhanced and protected that sphere of function.
They identified, for example, a number of mushrooms, some that grow on trees, that they
saw as having that property.
And when we test these by modern methods of testing in the West, we find that they actually
enhance immune function.
They increase numbers and activity of immune cells.
That to me is a striking example of the practical differences that come from thinking functionally
versus being locked into structural thinking.
And I think that's a major reason for the blind spot that's out there about healing.
Why our medical thinkers have such difficulty with that concept.
Now, I also told you that I thought that healing was really the rule rather than the exception.
I want you to remember that, that most diseases are self-limited.
And by the way, that vastly complicates interpretation of treatment.
Because if most diseases end by themselves, then a great many practitioners may be taking
credit for their methods when their methods have nothing to do with the outcome.
And that applies both to conventional practitioners and to alternative practitioners.
I've always been fascinated about how what we see or don't see is really a product of
the concepts that we carry in our head.
And I can't resist here telling you a little story.
Years ago, I met a woman whose thing was finding four-leaf clovers.
If you put her in a lawn, she would make a bet with anyone that within a minute of saying
go, she would find a four-leaf clover, and she always won.
And to me, this looked, I mean, totally mysterious.
You know, I could never find four-leaf clovers.
But I remember always thinking, here is this woman who did this.
How did she do it?
So it seemed to me that, first of all, she operated on the assumption that there were
four-leaf clovers there.
And if you don't operate from that assumption, you're not going to find them.
So operating on that assumption, I began to get pretty good at finding four-leaf clovers.
And I can't always do it, but I know when I can do it.
And I've written about this, and I've talked about this, and I talked about it at a workshop
that I was giving a couple of years ago in Montana at a nice place called the Feather
Pipe Ranch that has a great lawn with lots of clover.
And then I wrote about this in the book, Spontaneous Healing.
The next year, I taught this seminar again, and a lot of people came specifically to find
four-leaf clovers, people who had never found a four-leaf clover in their lives.
So I said, look, here we have a, there's a real chance here.
I want you to go out and do it.
Well, it turned out that there were about three people in the group who really had it.
And they were able to transfer that to other people.
There was an orgy of four-leaf clover finding.
And over the next three days on this one lawn, people found 250 four-leaf clovers.
I mean, some people who'd never found a four-leaf clover, some found a dozen in an hour.
People were finding five and six-leaf clovers.
I mean, and this is all because they had the belief, they had that concept in place.
I think healing is something like a four-leaf clover.
You know, for many of us, it seems like a rare event.
It's something elusive that people don't believe in.
The first step to discovering healing is to have that concept, to believe that it's possible.
And one way to get that belief is to be in the presence of people who have experienced
it, often not medical doctors.
And in fact, the absence of teaching about healing in medicine, I think, breeds a tremendous
pessimism about the body's capacity for healing, which doctors often convey, either wittingly
or unwittingly, to patients.
This is something that I call medical hexing.
Now, I think many times doctors don't mean to do this consciously.
But unconsciously, without thinking, in the way they use words, they tell people that
they're not going to get better.
I see this so often in my practice that people come to me telling me that doctors have told
them that there's no possibility that they can get better, or that they have to take
medication for the rest of their life, or they have to have an operation.
There are no other options.
I think that's dreadful.
I've collected these examples as well.
Let me give you one story that I think illustrates this.
A man came to me from Vancouver, Canada, some years ago, in his late 50s.
The story was that he'd had a three-year history of urinary disturbance that he had ignored.
And finally, he had gone to a doctor at the University of British Columbia, and this turned
out to be prostate cancer.
And at the time that it was diagnosed, it had already gone to the bones of the pelvis,
which is a bad prognosis.
And they told him the only treatment they could offer was hormonal treatment to slow
the growth down.
He was terrified.
In fact, he wouldn't even come in to see me at the time of the appointment.
His wife came in, and he stayed out in the car, and I had to go out and persuade him
to come in.
He was so terrified by doctors.
He had seized on visualization as the thing that was going to save him, and he was aggressively
spending three hours a day trying to visualize his immune system destroying the cancer.
But meantime, he was a two-pack-a-day smoker and had made no change in that.
I asked him about the smoking, and he told me this story.
He said that when the doctor at the University of British Columbia had given him the diagnosis,
he had said to him, should I stop smoking?
And the doctor said, well, at this point, why bother?
Now, I think if you talk to that doctor, he would think that he was doing the patient
a favor.
You know, he was sparing him further trouble.
But what the patient heard was, you are going to die soon.
And I would say that is exactly the equivalent of a curse in a shamanistic culture.
This is a priest of technological medicine sitting in his temple telling a person that
he has little time left.
And that was the source of the patient's terror.
It was the reason why he was paralyzed about making constructive changes in his life.
And I would say that also was a severe obstacle to his experience in healing.
So I can't overemphasize the importance of belief, concepts, mind.
And one way to erase this kind of negative programming is to seek out people who have
experienced healing, especially of conditions that you may have.
Now, if we had a National Institute of Health and Healing, one of the functions that it
could perform for us would be to maintain a National Registry of Healing.
So that if you are diagnosed with a condition like lupus, for example, you or your doctor
could call the National Registry and be given the names of people in your area of the country
who had had that disease and were now cured.
And you could talk to them and get ideas as to what you could do.
And what works for one person might not work for you, but you've got to keep looking.
You know, the point is there's something there to be accessed.
The keys may be different in different cases, but there is something in you that can be
accessed, turned on, that will cause these results.
You know, I said that there are many lifestyle choices that influence the healing system.
And I don't have time to go into great detail there, but I can just give you some examples
of what I mean.
Diet, for example, clearly plays a role.
And I'll just give you one, just one little example.
I'm a great believer in the healing properties of soybeans.
Soybeans contain a group of chemicals called isoflavones, which act like estrogens.
They're plant estrogens.
Women in Japan have, on traditional diets, have very low rates of breast cancer.
And they also don't experience menopausal symptoms.
They don't get hot flashes the way we do in the West.
The low cancer rates had been thought to be due to low fat intake, but recently we found
that fat is not as great a risk factor in breast cancer as we thought.
I think the answer is high soy intake.
And there is a theory out there, controversial, but I think it's right, that the reason for
the worldwide epidemic of breast cancer that we're seeing is the widespread existence in
the environment of pollutants, products of plastics manufacture, pesticides, which are
everywhere, that act like estrogens.
So that women today are exposed to much greater estrogenic pressure than they ever were.
You can try to limit your exposure.
You can get water filters, you can get organic produce, and so forth, but you can't eliminate
it.
But another strategy is to eat soy, because the soy phytoestrogens, the plant estrogens,
occupy estrogen receptors.
They activate them only weekly, and they block access by these stronger foreign chemicals
that are out there in the environment.
So this is a way of helping the body's healing system.
And it's an example of how choices in food may interact with your healing system to produce
a good result.
In the same way, I think we can make choices about how we exercise, about how we handle
stress, especially about how we use our minds.
It's also comforting to know that there are, out there in the world, tonics, substances,
natural substances that are nontoxic, that stretch or tone the body's defensive and healing
capacities.
For example, garlic is a fabulous tonic.
There is a huge stack of medical literature now on garlic.
There have been two international conferences on the medicinal properties of garlic.
It is a superior tonic for the cardiovascular system.
It lowers blood pressure.
It inhibits the clotting tendency of the blood.
It lowers cholesterol.
It has antibiotic properties, which are quite spectacular.
It has anti-cancer, anti-mutagenic properties.
It's a good thing.
Eat it.
Ginger is another one, probably less well-known here, very prized in the Orient, that has
remarkable anti-inflammatory capacity, equal really to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory
drugs and works on the same system.
But many of these natural remedies take longer to work.
They're not going to work within hours.
You may have to take ginger on a regular basis over several months before there's a change
in your hormonal chemistry that mediates inflammation.
I had one patient, a woman in her late 40s, who had a rotator cuff injury to her shoulder,
was in great pain, and was told that the only recourse for her was surgery.
She tried acupuncture.
She tried all sorts of methods.
She wanted to avoid the operation.
She read about ginger, took it, and that has solved the problem for her.
She's now pain-free, just using ginger alone.
So it's nice to know that there are these things out there that can help you.
There's a lot of things that you can do, and this is an area in which you want to inform
yourself about what you can do in your choices of lifestyle that can enhance and protect
your body's healing capacity.
These are crucial decisions to make.
And you've heard me talk a lot about the mind and its influence on the body and influence
on healing.
Again, this is a subject completely ignored in medicine today.
There is lip service paid to the mind, but it is not really considered as real as the
appendix, which is something that can be measured and touched and ultimately taken out.
And the problem we have there is, again, this is conceptual.
It's that Western science is very locked into materialism.
We tend not to believe in that which we can't touch, measure, see.
And the idea that something non-physical could produce a change in the physical system does
not compute in Western science.
And this is why in medicine we have never really been able to make sense of hypnosis,
why we can't make sense of placebo responses, why we regard placebo responses as nuisances.
There are things that mess up our experiments, and people are always trying to rule out the
placebo response.
We should be ruling this in.
The placebo response is a pure healing response.
It's the pure activity of the healing system coming from within, elicited by belief, unmixed
up with the direct effects of treatment, which are likely to be toxic.
We should be trying to make these responses happen more often.
The healing response is the greatest ally that physicians have.
And there are ways.
This is part of the art of medicine, of learning how to sense the belief structures of patients
and present treatments in ways that increase the probability of healing occurring.
But it's very difficult for us to make sense of this if we lack the concept that a change
in the physical system can have a non-physical cause.
And if we have difficulty with the mind, when you try to talk about spirit in medicine,
well, that's completely over the border.
We hardly know how to talk about that in other areas of life, and certainly not in medicine.
And it's very difficult to know what that means to look at people as not just physical
bodies, but also as mental, emotional beings and spiritual beings.
In terms of thinking about spirit and what it means to try to bring spirit into medicine,
I think there's a clue in the fact that in most Indo-European languages, unfortunately
not English, the words for spirit and the word for breath are the same word.
That's true in Greek.
The word is nouma, in Latin spiritus, in Hebrew ruach, in Sanskrit prana.
It's the same word.
The same word means both spirit and breath.
Many people throughout history have seen the movement of breath in the body as the movement
of spirit and matter.
Many cultures believe that life begins with the first breath and ends with the last breath,
so that before a baby has begun to breathe, it's not invested with spirit.
Spirit is somewhere in the vicinity, but until the breath cycle starts, the connection has
not been made between spirit and body.
In Islam, there is a belief that before birth, Allah allots you a fixed number of breaths,
and when you use those up, you die.
That's argument for learning how to slow down your breathing.
By the way, when you begin to work with breath, the qualities that you want to develop in
breathing are to make it deeper, slower, quieter, and more regular.
Whenever you think about it, you can try to do that.
If you're standing in the line at a supermarket, if you're stopped at a red light, just try
taking some deep, slow, quiet, regular breaths.
Take a deep breath with me now, and remember that the literal meaning of the word conspiracy
is to breathe together, so we are doing conspiracy for health here when we do this, so please
remember to breathe.
That's one way of activating the healing system, and I want to leave you with a question.
If we're so good at healing, why do we get sick?
I'll talk about sickness and treatment when we resume.
Next, the seven strategies of successful patients when we return to spontaneous healing with
Dr. Andrew Weill.
I have to tell you that I'm a realist, and as a realist, I observe that perfect health
is not attainable, and I want to warn you about people and products that promise you
perfect health.
It's not possible.
Health is a temporary equilibrium that has to break down periodically as all the forces
and circumstances of your life change.
Everything is changing constantly, and this is the normal process that this equilibrium
of health breaks down in order to be reformed in a better configuration to take account
of changing circumstances.
It is normal to be sick, but getting sick need not be disabling.
It need not be forever.
It's possible to move through these breakdowns of health quickly, and I think that should
be the goal, but really beware of all those voices out there that tell you if you do this
or buy this or read this that you'll never be sick ever again.
That's not the way it is, and that's not a useful way to think.
When we get sick, of course your greatest ally is the healing system, but at any given
moment the healing system can be overwhelmed by the circumstances of illness.
It can be blocked, it can be stalled, or simply overwhelmed, and that creates the possibility
of intervention, of treatment.
Ideally, treatment should be designed to facilitate healing, and actually I think that's what
happens anyway.
I think when we give treatments and people get better, the ultimate reason for getting
better has to do with the healing system.
Let me give you an example because this is again a little bit of a conceptual shift.
Let's say I get an acute bacterial pneumonia, and I'm suddenly critically ill and have to
go to a hospital where I'm given intravenous antibiotics, and 48 hours later I'm out of
danger and have a quick recovery.
I think most people, doctors and patients alike, would say that it was the antibiotics
that cured me.
I want you to think of this in a little different way.
What the antibiotics do in this situation is knock the population of germs down to a
point where the immune system can take over and finish a job that it couldn't do because
it was overwhelmed.
The ultimate cause of the cure is the operation of the immune system, which I see as one component
of the body's healing system.
I think that's a model for how treatments work.
When treatments work, they don't do so directly.
They work by unblocking or activating or reducing the overwhelming circumstances that have kept
healing from happening.
That's an important distinction to make.
Treatment originates from outside.
Healing originates from within.
The best treatment is that which is least invasive, least expensive, least productive
of harm, which produces the maximal possibility of activating an internal healing response.
Now, I said to you that most diseases are self-limited, and that's certainly the rule,
but when disease persists, when it involves symptoms that are out of your normal range
of experience, it's very important to know how to select from the enormous range of treatments
that are available out there today.
I think the first decision that confronts people or should confront people is whether
you're going to use standard medicine.
I think in order to make that decision wisely, you have to have a sense of what standard
medicine can do and what it can't do.
It's not a good idea to go to a conventional doctor with a disease that conventional medicine
can't treat.
The likelihood is that you'll be given treatment anyway, and it's more likely to do you harm
than good.
That harm can be financial, it can be physical, it can be emotional, or all of the above.
It's also not a good idea to go to an alternative provider with a condition that standard medicine
can treat very well.
That would be equally foolish.
I think it's important for both doctors and patients to learn to make those distinctions,
and that involves knowing what standard medicine can do in general.
Standard medicine has been outstandingly successful at treating some kinds of infectious illness,
specifically bacterial infections for which we have antibiotics.
However, as you all know from seeing movies and reading books, this is an area in which
we're rapidly losing our efficacy, and this is purely as a result of overusing these tools.
If we had restricted the use of antibiotics to those situations when they were really
needed, we would not now be facing the prospect of coming epidemics of organisms that are
going to resist all of our best weapons.
That's just the reality of what we've done.
We have not been very good at treating other kinds of infectious illnesses.
We still are not very good at treating viral infections of any kind, whether it's rabies
or the common cold.
We can prevent some of them with immunization, and I think that is another area of outstanding
standard medical success, as well as public health and attention to the way that diseases
are spread.
In general, standard medicine has evolved toward being very good at managing crises,
at very severe kinds of medical problems, and hospital medicine particularly has become
more and more oriented toward crisis medicine.
We're good at reconstructing hips and knees, and this is a good success.
We're good at cosmetic and reconstructive surgery.
I'm not thinking about breast augmentation there.
I'm thinking about people who have been scarred by birth defects or injury.
This is miraculous to be able to do this for people.
There are other huge areas in which we're not successful at all.
I mentioned viral illnesses.
We're not very good at dealing with most chronic degenerative disease, which is the major category
of illness that now comes into the offices of internists.
In the early part of the century, it was infectious disease.
But as we roll back infectious disease, what doctors began to see more and more of was
chronic degenerative disease, especially in an aging population, and that we're not very
good at.
We're not very good at dealing with allergies and autoimmune diseases.
We're, I think, terrible at dealing with mental illnesses.
We're not good at dealing with the whole range of what we call psychosomatic illnesses.
These are big categories of disease that standard medicine is relatively ineffective with.
As I say, I think it's good to know what medicine can do for you and what it can't do for you
in order to make wise decisions.
Let me just tell you a cautionary tale from my own practice.
Some years ago, a 65-year-old man consulted me.
He described episodes of pain that would begin in the pit of his stomach, spread through
his chest, sometimes radiate into the center of his back, sometimes into his left arm,
sometimes into his face.
He had tried various home remedies without success, and then he did not like standard
medicine, so we had gone to a number of alternative providers, a naturopath who had told him to
cut out sugar, which did nothing, and then told him to cut out wheat, which did nothing.
He then reluctantly went to a gastroenterologist who told him that he had a small gallstone,
which he didn't think was symptomatic, and that he also had a hiatal hernia.
And he prescribed one of the most popular drugs in medicine today, one of these anti-acid
drugs that suppress acid production in the stomach that did nothing for this man's pain.
So the prescription was changed to a stronger drug, which also did nothing for him, and
he stopped taking it.
He then went to another naturopath who tried various herbs on him that didn't work, and
then he went to a homeopathic practitioner who gave him a succession of remedies that
didn't work.
And he said that these episodes were becoming more frequent and were now waking him out
of sleep.
He said that it was made worse by lying down and made better by sitting up, and it was
also made worse by exertion.
Now hiatal hernia pain, that follows this pattern of worse lying down and better sitting
up, but digestive pain has no correlation with exertion.
I asked him very carefully about that, and I got a very clear story from him that this
pain was brought on by exertion.
And the more he talked, the more I became convinced that what he was describing was
coronary pain, not digestive pain.
And coronary pain that wakes you from sleep is a medical emergency.
And I told him that I couldn't work with him unless he went immediately to a cardiologist
for a stress test.
He was very good.
I got him the name of a good cardiologist.
He went the next day.
In the middle of the stress test, his heart went into a very dangerous ventricular arrhythmia,
which he had to be shocked out of, and the cardiologist told him he wouldn't be legally
responsible for his walking out of the office.
He was sent immediately to emergency coronary bypass surgery.
He's now well several years later.
And as I say, this is a cautionary tale, and there's all sorts of lessons there.
I mean, not only did the alternative providers miss this and waste a lot of time, but what
about the gastroenterologist who failed to note this, and why wasn't a cardiogram done
on him?
Anyway, it's bad medicine all around.
But this is the kind of thing that you can't let happen.
You must be alert for symptoms that are severe, unusual, out of your range of experience that
indicate that you should go to conventional medicine for evaluation and possibly for treatment.
Although even, you know, once the evaluation is done, you may then have a choice as to
what treatments you use, and even if you elect to do standard treatments, you might want
to use some other kinds of treatments to reduce their toxicity or to support the healing function
of the body.
Now, I for years have studied what's called alternative medicine, and I've got to tell
you I think it's a very mixed bag.
It includes ideas and practices that seem very sensible and I think would be wonderful
to incorporate into conventional medicine, and other ideas and practices that seem very
foolish and some of which seem dangerous.
And I think the real challenge is to try to sort out what is sensible and what's not sensible
in that world out there.
The whole focus of my work at the University of Arizona and in the teaching that I do is
to try to teach doctors and patients how to integrate these two worlds, how to build new
combinations of therapies that are cost effective, that work from the premise that the body can
heal itself if given a chance, that work, that take account of mind-body interactions,
that make use of all the available range of therapies, especially natural therapies.
And I think that this ideal of what I call integrative medicine is really the future.
It's what people want.
It's what has to happen.
Personally, I don't like the word alternative medicine very much.
It seems to me that that's a button-pushing term, and it's the wrong connotation.
It suggests that what you're trying to do is replace the whole show, and that's not
what it's about.
It's about marrying.
It's about using conventional medicine in its place.
If I had to make a gut estimate, I would say that the methods of standard medicine are
appropriate for somewhere between 15% and 20% of cases for which it's now being used.
If we restricted it to those cases, we would not now have an economic crisis in medicine.
But that's part of the challenge, is to figure out how to do this, how to create integrative
medicine.
I also don't like the term complementary medicine, which has become popular, especially in England.
That seems very milk toasty to me.
It suggests that what you're trying to do is keep standard medicine as the centerpiece,
and then you have these little garnishes around the edge.
And that's not my idea either.
I want a true synthesis, and the best of all these worlds put together into new possibilities.
This is what I do in my own medical practice, and I'll tell you just a little bit about
the kinds of patients I see.
I see people from all over.
About 10% of people who come to see me are well and want preventive lifestyle counseling.
I think that's terrific.
And whenever someone comes in and says they have no problems, I congratulate them for
coming to see me and tell them I wish more people would do that.
About half of the rest are people that have, I would say, routine problems, things like
sinus conditions, insomnia, anxiety, arthritis, and common disorders.
In those instances, I think there are tremendous possibilities, which most conventional doctors
don't know about, that are simpler, cheaper, and more effective than many of the remedies
that are used by standard medicine as first lines of intervention.
And often these are spectacularly effective, these kinds of therapies.
The other kinds of patients I see are people with overwhelming diseases.
I see a lot of cancer patients.
Some of these diseases are common, and some of them are odd.
And these patients as a group are very challenging.
And I think for them, I act mostly as a counselor who gives information about possibilities
of using selected aspects of standard medicine in combination with selected aspects of alternative
medicine.
And they're very grateful to get that kind of advice.
And again, I think this is a future possibility of medicine.
Let me just give you a few examples of how I might manage some common problems that would
be different from conventional medicine.
Let's take first an infectious condition like chronic sinusitis, a common problem, and one
that's increasing in the world, almost certainly because of air pollution.
There is an alarming rise of all sorts of respiratory conditions that seem to be aggravated
by air pollution all over the world.
And the conventional treatment for chronic sinus conditions is heavy use of antibiotics,
sometimes steroids, and often sinus surgery.
In my experience, these therapies are very disappointing in their result.
People become dependent on them.
They have to be used more and more and more.
Some of the things that I've found to work that assist the body to heal itself of this
condition are making some simple dietary changes.
And the most important one is to eliminate milk and milk products from the diet completely.
It may take two months to see an effect, but I would say that at least 90 percent of patients
who make that change find an enormous improvement in chronic sinus conditions.
It is very useful to teach people sinus hygiene, which includes regularly rinsing out the nose
with a salt water solution.
That's a simple yoga technique, actually, that one can learn to do to inhale salt water
and spit it out the mouth.
Very useful.
There are natural substances that help the body resist infection.
One is a Chinese herb called astragalus that some of you might know.
It's a root of a plant.
It's been long used in China to treat colds and flus.
It's nontoxic.
It's something that can be taken over long periods of time that increases immune activity
and helps the body resist infection.
It's also useful to teach people to use heat treatments if they begin to develop sinus
conditions.
This visualization can be a very effective technique.
Look at an allergic condition and hay fever as a common example.
There is a spectacular herbal remedy for hay fever, a plant called stinging nettles.
You can buy this in capsule form.
It's a freeze-dried extract of that plant.
Works as well as any antihistamine that I've discovered.
It has none of the side effects of antihistamines.
It's cheaper.
In fact, it even gives you minerals and vitamins in the process.
They're just a very useful thing to know about.
Take an autoimmune condition like rheumatoid arthritis, lots of possibilities here.
There are dietary changes that can be made, especially changing the fats in the diet to
avoid fats that promote inflammation like polyunsaturated vegetable oils and artificially
hardened fats like margarine, of eliminating dairy products, of supplementing the diet
with natural anti-inflammatory substances like ginger, which I mentioned, also turmeric,
the yellow spice that's used in mustard and curry has a significant anti-inflammatory
effect.
Swimming is a best exercise for people with arthritis because it eliminates the gravitational
stress on joints and allows them to move freely.
The mind-body connection in all autoimmune diseases is very powerful.
So I would send people with rheumatoid arthritis to hypnotherapists or visualization therapists
to help them take advantage of that connection.
There's a huge range of possibilities there, and I've seen very satisfactory results from
people using that.
And if people do have very severe flares of an autoimmune disease, they can use the conventional
treatments for short periods of time to get them over that and then go back to the natural
regimen.
I want to say a word here about cancer.
You know, I haven't talked much about that, and when people hear about healing, everyone's
interested in cancer remission.
I think cancer is a special case, and I think it should be separated out.
And the problem with cancer is that by the time a malignant cell gets to the point of
a detectable cancer, there have been many failures along the way of the body's mechanisms
of defense and healing.
So that by the time we can diagnose cancer, there has already been a longstanding pattern
of failure of the body's healing mechanism.
So the chances of observing spontaneous healing in cancer are much less than in many other
kinds of disease.
It doesn't mean they don't exist, but it's much less.
The conventional treatments that we have for cancer, except for surgery, I think are not
very good.
And I would predict to you that in the not-too-distant future, chemotherapy and radiation will be
obsolete treatments, and we'll look back on this period and not believe that we did this
to people.
But in some cases, this is the best that we have to do when we don't know anything else.
But clearly, when you look at cases of healing in cancer, especially spontaneous remissions,
it seems as if the immune system, which has been sleeping, has suddenly waked up and done
its job.
And clearly, the future of cancer treatment is going to be immunotherapy.
It's going to be methods of stimulating an immune response, of stimulating the natural
defense of the body, rather than trying to destroy cancerous cells.
Our methods of destroying those cells do not distinguish well enough between normal cells
and malignant cells.
But as I say, I think this is a special case.
And it's a strategic mistake to look at cancer remission, to try to build ideas of healing
and what the body is capable of, because if you only look at cancer, you come away with
a distorted view of what the healing system is capable of.
If you look at autoimmune diseases, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis,
I mean, these are also serious diseases, but there, healing occurs much more frequently.
There's a much higher potential for the healing system to limit these problems that can be
taken advantage of by therapists.
So I think I'm very interested in cancer.
As I said, I work with a lot of cancer patients.
But I think that's not the place to look to really get a sense of what the healing system
is capable of, of what it can do.
I want to talk briefly about what I have seen successful patients do.
One of the things I'm interested in, when I find people who've been healed, what do
they do?
And I have identified what I call seven strategies of successful patients, and I just want to
tell you about these.
The first is that these people did not take no for an answer.
When doctors told them there was no possibility that they could get better, they didn't believe
it.
And some of them made themselves real pains in the neck and were considered difficult
patients.
But you know, it's been said that nice patients finish last, and I think that's true.
These people didn't believe it.
Secondly, they actively sought out information about where they could get help.
Some of them went to medical libraries and read up on their diseases.
They interviewed other doctors.
They read books.
They took charge of the process of getting information, looking for sources of help.
A third strategy is that many of these people sought out other people who had been healed,
especially people that had had their disease or similar diseases.
I mentioned this to you earlier as a wonderful way to neutralize the negative programming
that may come at you from medical professionals who convey their pessimism to you, consciously
or unconsciously.
I also noted that many of these people formed constructive partnerships with health professionals.
Now, that takes some doing, but if you're lucky enough, if you can find a doctor who's
willing to say, I'm here to support you, I encourage you to experiment, I'm here to monitor
you, if you need treatment, I'll provide it, that's the kind of partnership that you want
to have with a health professional, even though that takes a lot of looking.
Another thing that these people did, they did not hesitate to make radical changes in
their lives, even if that meant major disruption.
Some of them quit jobs that had been long sources of poor mental health.
Some of them ended destructive relationships.
Some of them made major changes in how they ate.
They were willing to make big changes in lifestyle.
A sixth pattern that I noticed is that many of these people, especially from the vantage
point of having been successful, looked back and came to regard their illness as a gift.
In fact, the greatest gift that they had ever received, because it forced them to make these
changes in their lives.
It forced them, even though the change was often wrenching, it forced them into a new
way of living that ultimately brought them not only health, but joy and fulfillment in
a lot of other dimensions of their life.
And related to that, a seventh pattern that I've seen is that many of these people cultivated
an attitude of self-acceptance.
And this is an interesting point because it's at variance with what the culture tells us.
You know, often our culture tells us that if you have an overwhelming disease, something
very serious, that you've got to fight it.
I know so many people who say, you know, I'm going to beat this thing.
I'm going to fight it.
And this resonates with a lot of our cultural imagery.
We wage wars on cancer, for example.
There's a lot of war and military imagery in medicine.
We talk about the therapeutic arsenal and weapons against disease.
And many people assume this kind of fighting stance toward an illness.
I just present this as an observation.
In many of the people that I know who have experienced healing, they resigned themselves.
They submitted to everything about their present circumstances, including the fact of being
sick.
And somehow that mental shift activated a healing process, even though they weren't
looking for that.
It was that letting go or submitting that enabled the healing system to do its work.
And finally, I want to talk to you when we come back about the future of medicine and
how we can all make a new kind of medicine come into existence.
We'll return to the conclusion of Spontaneous Healing with Dr. Andrew Weill in just a few
moments.
As we speak, our medical institutions are self-destructing.
Hospitals are beginning to go bankrupt, and I think that's going to accelerate.
I think it's reasonable to look forward to a time in the not-distant future when large
areas of the country are going to be left with only one central hospital, which will
be the only one that will be able to afford all the fancy equipment.
And a lot of the smaller and community hospitals aren't going to be there anymore.
It's interesting to think about what might take their place, and I'll give you a speculation
about that.
The day-to-day practice for many physicians is becoming miserable as a result of managed
care.
We are unable to provide the conventional medical care to many people who need it most.
These are economic realities.
And it's ironic that all this has befallen medicine at a time when medical research and
science is on the verge of uncovering really the keys, the basic mechanisms of how genes
express themselves, how cells communicate.
The irony is that the chance that any practically useful treatments are going to come out of
this research is vanishingly small, and the limitation is expense.
And no one saw this coming.
Medicine was riding along in the century, great business as usual, and it suddenly ran
into a wall, and the wall was economic, and no one saw that coming.
And at the same time that medicine has been beset by this economic catastrophe, it's being
hit by another force from a completely unexpected direction, and that is it's losing the clients.
It's losing the market.
There is an enormous worldwide consumers movement away from conventional medicine toward what's
called alternative medicine.
This is happening in every country.
And medicine is being squeezed from both directions at the same time that it's collapsing of its
own weight economically, it's losing the market.
And this is producing enormous chaos within medicine.
Now I have to tell you, I am a great fan of the healthcare crisis because for the first
time I see openness developing in professional medicine and medical institutions that has
never been there.
And only months ago, the American Medical Association urged member physicians to keep
an open mind toward alternative treatments.
I mean, who would ever think that such a thing would have happened?
And again, this has been forced upon us by economics.
I think there's a real lesson here.
Only the way that change happens in institutions is from economic pressure.
We could do any amount of arguing about ideology, but it's economic realities that have begun
to bring this change about.
I think that the wall that medicine ran into is actually a very logical consequence of
the path that it chose to evolve on in this century.
Somewhere around the beginning of the century, medicine turned its back on nature.
That was the beginnings of this movement that led to the separation between botany and medicine,
for example, that I've experienced firsthand.
And in its enthusiasm for technology, it embarked on a course that has now led us to an economic
catastrophe.
And the root of that is simply that medicine has become overly reliant and dependent on
technology and has turned away from the natural sources of healing, which I think are what
medicine should be all about.
When I walk into my medical school in Arizona, there's a big statue of Hippocrates in front
of the building.
Hippocrates is considered the father of Western medicine.
And it's ironic to put a statue of him in front of a medical institution because the
two teachings of Hippocrates that we most remember him for are his saying, first, do
no harm, and second, to revere the healing power of nature, both principles we consistently
ignore in conventional medicine today.
But I think that out of this chaos and confusion, there is the possibility of creating a whole
new kind of medicine.
I've told you about this dream I have of integrative medicine.
And for the first time, I see medical institutions being willing to look at that.
The simple fact is that our medical schools are not producing doctors who can satisfy
the needs of patients today.
Patients want doctors who will take the time or have the time to listen to them, who can
explain things to them in terms that they can understand, who can present them with
options for treatment that include this whole range of possibilities.
They want doctors who will not just tell them to take drugs or do surgery.
They want doctors who are aware of the connection between the mind and the body, who will not
laugh in their faces when they mention things like Chinese medicine or herbal treatment,
who are literate about nutrition, who can talk intelligently about vitamins and minerals.
Our medical schools aren't producing these people.
That has to change.
The word doctor comes from the Latin word for teacher, and it seems to me that the main
function of doctors should be to teach people about health and healing.
The most effective way to teach is by example.
Doctors should model health and healthy living for patients.
How can you learn to model health if you've come out of a system that has deprived you
of sleep, that's given you no information about how to eat, how to handle stress, how
to relax, how to use your body to enhance healing?
We work actively against that.
All this has to change.
One of the dreams that I have is to see a whole new kind of institution come into existence.
I would call it a hybrid between a hospital and a spa, and I'd like to see it called a
healing center.
I think that much of what is now treated in hospitals could be much more profitably treated
in residential healing centers.
When you came out of these, you'd know more than when you went in about how to live, about
how to eat, how to prepare food, how to shop, how to handle stress, how to exercise and
so forth.
This would be paid for by insurance because in the long run, it's going to save the insurers
a lot of money to have a healthier population.
I think this is a very real possibility.
I'm working to bring these kinds of institutions into existence.
In them, I would see that the supervision of care would be under broadly trained generalist
physicians, but there would be a whole array of other kinds of treatments available.
Doctors and patients in partnership could decide on which were most appropriate.
I think this is something also that's inevitable that has to happen.
I think that the changes we're going to see in medicine are going to amount to a genuine
revolution, and I just want to give you a little idea about that.
When I was doing my travels in the 70s, I spent a lot of time with Indian tribes in
South America, some in North America.
I was always very struck by the fact that when Indians use the word medicine, which
they do frequently.
They talk about medicine men, medicine women, medicine songs and so forth.
Their concept of medicine is quite different from ours, and I'm tempted to call it medicine
with a capital M. It takes into account aspects of life that we don't look at in medicine.
The Indian concept of medicine embraces spiritual aspects of human beings.
It embraces what we call magic and religion, which are seen in conventional medicine as
having nothing to do with medicine.
I think our society desperately needs medicine with a capital M, medicine in the larger sense.
And I think that if we can get this kind of change happening in medicine, it will be an
enormous catalyst for change throughout society because we have so much investment in medicine.
It impacts our lives so much.
Doctors have stepped into the roles that priests and shamans play in traditional cultures, and
we've put them in those roles, but our doctors are in no way equipped to handle that function.
For example, one of the key functions of a shaman is to mediate between the visible world
of everyday experience and the invisible world.
How can you do that if you don't believe that an invisible world exists?
You can't.
So we need a whole new kind of physician, and that change is being forced on us.
It's going to happen.
There are ways that you can participate in this and make this change happen more frequently.
I want to remind you that all the changes coming about in medicine today are consumer
driven.
So these changes are not originating within the medical profession.
The medical profession is being dragged kicking and screaming in this direction because that's
where the market is.
That's what people want.
You have enormous power as consumers of health care to influence this movement.
So keep doing it.
But ultimately, the most important thing that you can do is to work on yourself and to begin
by keeping this concept in place that the body can heal itself if given a chance.
I mean, this is the piece that's missing.
It's missing not only from professional medicine.
It's missing from our culture in general.
People are constantly looking outside for help.
The power to heal is within you.
Your body can heal itself.
Just give it a chance.
Thank you.
Well done.