Andrew Weil: If You’re Only Using Conventional Medicine, You Need To Watch This!

One piece of practical advice I will give you is never stay in treatment with a doctor who thinks you can't get better. Very important. And over the years, you know, I don't see patients these days, very rarely, but when I was seeing a lot of patients, I had many, many patients come to me, sometimes years after I'd seen them who say that the most important thing that I did for them was that I was the only doctor they ever saw who told them they could get better. I'm a medical doctor and an author and a business person. I wear two hats. One is an academic hat. I founded and direct a center of excellence at the University of Arizona College of Medicine called the. It's just been renamed the Andrew Weil center for Integrative Medicine, which is the leading effort in the world to train health professionals, mostly physicians, in this new model of healthcare called integrative medicine. You know, the short version is that's the intelligent combination of conventional and alternative medicine. Really. It's about taking the best of conventional medicine and using lifestyle modification and natural therapies to produce better outcomes at lower costs. We have a very intensive fellowship training, a thousand hours done over two years for physicians, and we've graduated 1,800 people from that so far. We're self sustaining through tuition. We also now have our curriculum embedded in residency training. It's been now in 70 some residency programs in the US and some abroad as well. We have trainings, online trainings for other health professionals and the general public. So that's my academic hat. And then I also do things for the general public. I write books. I maintain a website, drwill.com which is a great resource, the newsletter you mentioned. I also am a founder and now minority owner of True Food Kitchen Restaurants.

How many have eaten them?

Yeah, we now have 28 of them around the country and, you know, more coming rapidly. It's been a very successful and satisfying venture.

You're growing that. I actually wrote 25 and now you have 28.

So this is awesome. So those are some of the things I do. And I like having fun and I get bored very quickly if something becomes repetitive or is not satisfying to me.

I mean, do you think of yourself as an entrepreneur?

Yes. Yeah, I've always been an entrepreneur.

Yeah. So what are you currently working on? And how would someone define integrative medicine? Because when you hear that, it's like, what does that actually mean?

Well, I think that, you know, this is a new system which I think is clearly the way of the future, that places great Emphasis on the human organism's potential for healing. So that I think most people have very little confidence in their body's ability to heal. So that's the first thing. Strong emphasis on healing. It also looks at, at patients as more than physical bodies. It's whole person medicine that looks at the mental, emotional aspects, spiritual aspects of being. It places great emphasis on lifestyle. So when you sit with an integrated physician, they will ask you about diet, sleep, what you do for fun, you know, all that stuff. Then we make use of all available therapies, wherever they come from, as long as they're not going to hurt people and show reasonable evidence of efficacy. And we don't reject conventional medicine and we don't accept alternative treatment uncritically. I am absolutely certain this is the way of the future because the great promise of integrative medicine is that it can lower health care costs by bringing in treatments that are not dependent on expensive technology, including pharmaceuticals, as well as through its attention to lifestyle, really practice real prevention. And I'm also confident that one day we'll be able to drop the word integrative. It'll just be good medicine.

Good medicine. You know, okay, let's kind of talk just that term, good medicine. So there's a lot of doctors, medical, and there's a lot of, you know, there's functional medicine, doctors, there's all kinds of different doctors. And there are, I think, like when any industry, there's some amazing ones and there's ones that just aren't a lot of it. Is this a pill for an ill? It's either medicine or it's some sort of supplement. And to what degree do. Because we live in a culture where they want a magic pill. Right. And a lot of people are trained that way. And you see so much advertising that way. And of course, your emphasis on food, and I believe food is medicine. So how do you think about supplementation and exercise and eating as it all works together? I mean, what are your thoughts on.

Well, you know, I think the big components of healthy lifestyle, certainly diet. And there's a lot of information that we have about what is a good diet. I see an awful lot of people today who follow extreme eating patterns that I think are unwise in the long term. I think physical activity is critical to good health. I think it's also important to change the nature of physical activity as you age. In my 20s, I ran and then I got signals from my knees that they didn't like that anymore. And I changed to cycling. I did that for a long Time. Now I'm a swimmer and that's my main activity. I also have two big dogs that walk me every day. But I love swimming. But I think it's important to be physically active. I think that managing stress is key and there's lots of ways of doing. You can't live without stress, but you can practice methods that neutralize its harmful effects on your mind and body. My favorite are simple breathing techniques because they're so time and cost efficient.

So you're a swimmer. One thing I and you mentioned, you know, as you got, you used to run in the beginning. I have to bring this up and I didn't have it as a question, but what I found when we were talking when we went out to lunch in Tucson is that you were a fan of Dr. John Sarno's work.

Yes.

When it comes to physical pain, and I'm a huge believer, I think the vast majority of the way that pain is treated and diagnosed and I lived in chronic pain for most of my adult life, which the way Sarno would describe what he called tms. In the beginning he called it tension myositis syndrome. Then it became tension myoneuro, then the mind body syndrome. And you're an expert in this area. And he said that the pain is caused by oxygen deprivation and brought on by repressed emotions, predominately anger and rage. And so Steve Ozanich, who wrote recent books on it, he sent you some of his books. Can you explain that from your standpoint about how much the mind and emotional states affect the physical body?

Well, to me this is one of the great limitations of conventional medicine is that it is totally stuck in the biomedical model which sees only that which is physical as being real. And in that model it, if you observe a change in a physical system, the cause has to be physical. The idea of non physical causation of physical events is not allowed. And for that reason, all of the whole realm of mind body medicine is viewed with great suspicion by conventional science and medicine and that enormously limits their ability to manage these conditions. With back pain particularly, one of the most striking facts about it is that you can see, you can look at X rays and scans of people that look so horrible you can't imagine, imagine that they are not crippled by pain and they have no symptoms whatever. On the other hand, you can look at scans and X rays of people that look completely normal and the people are disabled by pain. So there's a very low correlation between physical findings and subjective experience. And that's one of the things that Sarno is based on. So this is a major component of integrative medicine. I call it whole person medicine, where you don't exclude the mind. That's like. It's key. Let me tell you one story. A couple weeks ago, I was in Japan, and I spent time in Okinawa, which is one of my favorite places. When I was doing research for my book healthy aging, I made a number of trips there because Okinawa has had the highest concentration of centenarians in the world. And it's very interesting to look at their. You know, what is it about that? It's awful hard to tease all those things apart. It's a tropical Pacific paradise with clean air and water. The Okinawan diet is one of the most interesting diets I've ever seen and enormous. Not very different from mainland Japanese diet, but incredible variety of sea and land vegetables, unusual foods. Okinawans get great physical activity all the time, not by going to gyms and using exercise machines. They're calling in fish nets and carrying water and chopping wood and hoeing in the garden and stuff like that. But I think especially there is an enormous influence on. Of the way that aging is thought of in that culture. The old people in Okinawa are honored. They're living treasures. They're made part of all community activities. One story I collected there, which I think is very telling, is that a common cause of sibling fighting in traditional Okinawan society is over who is going to get to take care of the aging parents. Very different from here. Anyway, I was in. There's a village in Okinawa called Ogimi, which is celebrated as the longevity village. I had been there a number of times, but I went back this time, and they paraded out a number of their old centenarians, which they do. And all of them were asked what was the secret of their longevity. And one of the things that they all said was, eat everything. Interesting. However, in the past couple of years, Okinawan longevity has plummeted, and now Hong Kong has surpassed them, which is hard for me to believe. And the fall in Okinawan longevity is entirely attributed to McDonald's. That there has been a sudden appearance of American fast food, and people go for it. So when these people say eat everything, I don't think they meant McDonald's. I think it was their traditional vibes. But how dramatic to see this change in such a short time.

No doubt. Wow, that's fascinating.

One woman who was 102, I think another secret that she had, which I've started to practice. She says, you want to move your fingers all the time she was always doing things like this. She said it's very good for the brain.

Well, you know, even ping pong, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you said with you go to an integrated medicine doctor assuming that, you know, they're, they're a good one trained by you, they'll ask you about sleep, they'll ask you about lifestyle.

Yeah.

And where going back to. I want to make this about just pain in particular. It's just every time I had physical pain and I would go to a doctor or a chiropractor, the vast majority would immediately give me a structural diagnosis. They weren't asking how's your relationship, how's your stress level, how's your sleep, you know, how are you eating? And I think if you're going to go to have any sort of doctor and they're not going to really get to how you're living your life and finding out what are the impediments.

But the problem is that as medicine has been so put in a for profit model, the time allotted for doctor patient interactions has shrunk to the point where now even if a doctor wanted to, they don't have time to ask these questions.

So it's a systemic problem. Not even just the docs.

It's huge. One piece of practical advice I will give you is never stay in treatment with a doctor who thinks you can't get better. Very important. And over the years, I don't see patients these days, very rarely. But when I was seeing a lot of patients, I had many, many patients come to me, sometimes years after I'd seen them who say that the most important thing that I did for them was that I was the only doctor they ever saw who told them they could get better.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to Joe's free book and you can get a copy there. You've done a lot of work in drug and addiction research and what is your perspective on addiction and recovery and how can we best help families heal and recover? Since you know, that's one of my main areas of focus.

I think addiction is a really tough problem. First of all, I think it's universal. I think all of us are addicted in one way or another to one thing or another. The only reason we don't see that is that some addictions are socially accepted, acceptable. Workaholism, workaholism, addiction to shopping, addiction to power, addiction to thinking, which is very prominent in intellectual circles. I mean, there's all sorts of things. How to deal with addictions, I think, is really tough. I mean, one strategy is to shift addictive behavior to things that are less harmful rather than more harmful. You know, it's better to be addicted to running than to cigarette smoking, for example. But it's still an addiction to try to get to the root of addictive behavior. I think that's really tough. I think that's, you know, I think the people that have it right are Buddhist psychologists who say that the root of addictive behavior is attachment. It's the illusion that satisfaction and completeness come from something external to you. And until you can practice realizing that you are completely complete as is, it's hard for you to be free. I think the most encouraging thing that I see about addiction is that. And this is true of everything I looked at, whether it's cigarettes or heroin. If people progress, I mean, just go through life enough and don't get snuffed out in one way or another, one day their motivation to drop it becomes. Reaches a point at which it's easy. You see people that have tried to quit smoking again and again, and they talk about what a struggle it is and how hard, and they go back to it. And one day a person wakes up and maybe looking at stained fingers or looking at a dirty ashtray, and suddenly they don't want to do it anymore. And that time it's easy. The problem is, you can't put motivation into another person. And that's the frustration of addiction treatment. All you can do is arrange circumstances and encourage people to try and keep trying. And one day the reservoir of motivation is full enough that it becomes easy.

Yeah, well, you know, this. Now, this will always sound kind of weird When I bring up addiction stuff, but you are very knowledgeable in the area of shifting consciousness. And so, you know, I believe that addiction is a solution. It's not a very good solution. It could kill you. And I also believe that I'd like to see policy change because you can't punish the pain out of people. Right now we have, you know, the criminal justice system treating addiction, and we need a more compassionate approach. And there's ways to really shift consciousness. And so I want to ask you about plant medicines and psychedelics, Because I see MDMA coming down the pike. Psilocybin, you know, you have Lots of experience with. You wrote a book called the Natural Mind in 1971, my first book, A Revolutionary Approach to the Drug Problem. And you thought this would totally shift, but what happened is this war on drugs happened. And I mean, I'd love to have you. I know this is not an easy question, but what is consciousness? I mean, and looking at altering it and shifting it in ways so you live in the world in a better, happier, more connected space. Because I think the opposite of addiction is connection. And so anything you can speak to that.

Well, it's. Yeah, it is.

I know, I know.

I would say, you know, the argument that I get into with scientific materialists is over the nature of consciousness. They think that consciousness is a product of brain biochemistry or electrical activity in the brain. I think that consciousness is primary and that I think consciousness organizes matter into more and more complex forms. There's no way of proving one or the other. It's just a different worldview. But I find that my worldview makes things much more interesting. And my experiences also are that by changing consciousness, by changing what's in your head, you can change the external world. And I have seen that again and again. Just as a mundane example, I've for a long time lived with dogs. And I've always had Rhodesian Ridgebacks. And I had a male. I lived out in. I had a property that bordered on Saguaro national park, east of southeast of Tucson. And I had one big male who. All he wanted to do was crawl in your lap and snuggle. And I came home one day and found he had backed a worker, someone who was working on the landscape against a wall. The guy was brandishing a rake, and the dog hackles were up, snarling. There was no way to convince this guy that it was his emotions that were producing this behavior in the dog. There was no way to convince him that this was not a vicious attack dog that I had there. And I see this kind of thing all the time in interactions with people, interactions with all sorts of things. I've also seen. I'll just tell you a few. I've told these stories before, but some of the potentials that I see in psychedelics I had. This goes way back in my early exploratory days. I must have been about 28, I suppose. I had a lifelong allergy to cats. If a cat licked me, if a cat came near me, my eyes would itch. If it licked me, I'd get hives. So I never let cats near me. And one day I took LSD with A group of friends outdoors. It was a beautiful day. It was just. Everything was wonderful. In the midst of this, a cat jumped into my lap and my immediate reaction was sort of this. And then I thought, this is really silly. And I relaxed and I petted. The cat, had no allergic reaction. I've never had one since. So instant disappearance of a lifelong allergy. Tell you around the same time, even more even. First of all, I'd love to open Dr. Weil's allergy clinic. You know, maybe 10 sessions space, the week apart. And the first one, you get a full dose of whatever and then a kaleidoscope on your face, and then the dose reduces and at some point you're taking a placebo and you don't know when that happens. Allergies are learned responses. You can unlearn them. So this one's a little trickier to explain. I also had grew up being told that I could never get tan. I had fair skin. And my experience was when I was out in the sun, I would burn. I used to go down to the Jersey shore. And this is in the days before sunscreen. Probably the things we put on us magnified the effect of the sun. But anyway, sheets of skin peeling off, bright red, horrible pain. And then I'd be as fair as ever. So I just took this. No, I couldn't get tan. So also around this time, also with LSD on a beautiful day, I was living in rural Virginia. I was running around with no clothes on and I was lying in the grass and looking up at the sun. And I thought, this is also really silly. And I just sort of relaxed and exposed myself to the sun. And the next day I got tan. And I have ever since. Now that's a little trickier to explain. I mean, that has something.

Because the question is, what the hell's going on?

Well, what's going on? Probably your pigmentation is controlled by cells called melanocytes, which are close to neurons and they are involved with the immune system. So again, this has to be a mind mediated effect that changes the way that those cells behave. But I think that just hints at the kind of potential that's there. And same with the back pain stuff, that there are ways that you can change external reality and physical reality by changing things in your head.

My belief, because of all the pain I used to have and having spent a lot of time in the addiction recovery world with my own recovery, is I see addicts have a tremendous amount of back pain, knee pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, migraine headaches, skin problems, Digestive issues. And I think the same things that manifest themselves as addictions in destructive ways are the same mechanism that manifests in pain. And I don't hear very many people, if anyone, talking about it and linking the two together. But I think there's a huge things. Sleep problems, all kinds of stuff, because I've been, you know, and have you.

Do you have any experience with ibogaine or know people that have.

Oh, I'm. I'm the first person in the world to have. Before and after brain scans and serotonin and dopamine tests of doing ibogaine, I scanned my brain before, went and did it, came back and scanned it again. And I have hours of interviews with one of the top psychiatrists who specializes in using psychedelics and plant medicines for addiction treatment and ptsd. So, yeah, I've.

So this is the African. This is the African psychedelic and little known here and has a reputation now for treating addictive behavior sometimes very fast. It's not available here. There are clinics in Mexico.

That's where I went.

Right. But, you know, you asked at the beginning what's happening. It is remarkable to me to see this new interest in psychedelics in our culture and a lot of research. In the old days, it was a lot of research looking for bad effects, and now there's a lot of researchers trying to document positive effects of psychedelics. ARG has an initiative coming to legalize psilocybin. I think the potential for MDMA to treat ptsd, psilocybin for obsessive compulsive disorder and depression. I think these will eventually have these drugs be available for therapeutics.

Are you friends with Rick Doblin and. Yeah, I mean, Rick, he is just the guy. I mean, you got to really give him credit for the sheer amount of doors slammed in his face and the amount of resistance, but just wanting to go out there and find ways to help reduce human suffering.

So it's changing now. I mean, when I see characters on mainstream TV series microdosing, something is changing.

Exactly, yeah. Oh, you know Paul Stamets, he's your buddy. So with mushrooms, I mean, there's. So not just psychedelics, but what are the power of plant medicines?

Well, I'm trained as a botanist as well as a medical doctor. My undergraduate degree was in botany and I have a career interest in medicinal plants. And I have argued for many years and for most of that time this fell on totally deaf ears that plants are fundamentally different from chemicals taken out of them. Plants have very complex chemistry and when you pull One molecule out of a plant, the chances are you're going to greatly increase the potential for toxicity, but also that you may not reproduce the benefits that you see with the whole plant. And it has been gratifying to me to see that idea getting some traction now in medical journals and medical thinking. I think that plant medicine is safer. And, you know, you listen to conventional doctors and pharmacologists, and they go on about the dangers of herbal medicine. There are, you can count on the fingers of one hand, deaths from botanicals in a year. Do you have any idea how many people die from pharmaceuticals in the hospitalized population in this country alone, just in the hospital hospitalized population between probably somewhere around 300 or 400,000 deaths a year. And that's not mistakes. That's the right dose of the right drug given to the right patient for the right indication, and 300,000 people die. That is not acceptable.

Well, and you're talking like the number one killer sugar as far as I know. Second is tobacco, which I think was close. 475,000. Half a million. And then what the number you just gave. That's massive. I mean, even opiate deaths last year, they'd say around 60,000 is probably more like 100,000.

So huge advantage in safety when you're using plant medicines. And then also. But I think the quality of the effect is often much better. You know, there's a natural source of statins called red yeast rice. You can get this in any natural food store. It was used in Chinese medicine as a pigment, red pigment to color rice. And this fungus produces molecules that are like the statins that we use, but it's got a mixture of them in it, like seven different ones. One of the problems with statins is that they cause liver toxicity and muscle toxicity. People get muscle pain and liver dysfunction. The red yeast rice, you don't see those very, very rarely. So those side effects are much less likely to occur. And you can get cholesterol control the same. But there are many examples of that. And this is one of the curricular subjects in our integrative medicine training, botanical medicine.

So if you could wave a magic wand and have something happen in that arena, or even with psychedelics, what would you like to see happen in terms of getting this? Because I think people are not aware yet of just how much this. The world's going to shift in the next five to 10 years in this arena.

Well, first of all, with health care, we have to break this hold of these very powerful vested interests on our system. You know, as dysfunctional as the health care system is, it's generating rivers of money that are flowing into very few pockets. It's the pockets of the big pharmaceutical companies, the manufacturers of medical devices and the big insurers. And they have total control of our elected representatives. It does not matter if you. Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, you can't get elected to office in this country unless you have made deals with those vested interests. So there's no possibility of change coming from the government. The only possibility that I see for change is if a grassroots social political movement starts in which enough people get angry enough about the present situation and we begin electing different kinds of representatives who don't have those commitments. And I don't see that happening yet at the moment. It is totally easy for those interest to manipulate public opinion. Look how easy it was for Monsanto to convince voters in California to vote down GMO labeling of foods. How could anybody object to putting information on food labels? And yet Monsanto convinced the majority of voters in those states that somehow that was going to threaten jobs. So, you know, that's what we're up against at the moment. The whole system may have to crash in order for something new to come. But it's unsustainable as it is. We spend 20% of our. We spend 18% of our GDP on healthcare, more than any other people in the world by a huge margin. And we have worse outcomes than any other developed country. The World health organization rates us 38th on a par with Serbia any way you look at it. Infant mortality, longevity rates of chronic. Something's really wrong with that picture. And that's projected to go up to 20% of our GDP. Totally unsustainable. In terms of psychedelics, I think it's happening. You know it's happening. So, you know, the more favorable publicity that comes out, the more research data on positive effects, I think public opinion will shift.

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