Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies
www.pharmpress.com/fact
Focus Alternat Complement Ther©2005 Pharmaceutical Press
Focus Altern Complement Ther 2002; 7: 328–9
Andrew Weil was born in Philadelphia in 1942, received an AB degree in biology (botany) from Harvard in 1964 and an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1968. After completing a medical internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, USA, he worked a year with the National Institute of Mental Health, and then wrote his first book, The Natural Mind. From 1971 to 1975, as a Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, Dr Weil travelled widely in North and South America and Africa, collecting information on drug use in other cultures, medicinal plants and alternative methods of treating disease. From 1971 to 1984, he was on the research staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum and conducted investigations of medicinal and psychoactive plants.
At present, Dr Weil is Director of the Program in Integrative Medicine of the College of Medicine, University of Arizona, the first effort to change medical education to include information on alternative therapies, mind/body interactions, healing and other subjects not currently emphasised in the training of physicians. (He also holds appointments as Clinical Professor of Medicine and Clinical Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine.) He has a general practice in Tucson, Arizona, USA, focusing on natural and preventive medicine and diagnosis.
Andrew Weil is the author of many scientific and popular articles and of several books: The Natural Mind; The Marriage of the Sun and Moon; From Chocolate to Morphine (with Winifred Rosen); Health and Healing; Natural Health, Natural Medicine; and the international best-sellers, Spontaneous Healing and Eight Weeks to Optimum Health. His most recent books are Eating Well for Optimum Health: The Essential Guide to Food, Diet, and Nutrition and The Healthy Kitchen: Recipes for a Better Body, Life, and Spirit (with Rosie Daley). Dr Weil also publishes a monthly newsletter, Dr Andrew Weil’s Self Healing, maintains a popular website (http://www.drweil.com) and appears in videos featured on Public Broadcasting Service: He also writes a monthly column for Prevention magazine. A frequent lecturer and guest on talk shows, Dr Weil is an internationally recognised expert on medicinal plants, alternative medicine, and the reform of medical education. He lives near Tucson.
Q Who was your most influential teacher?
AW: Richard Evans Schultes, former director of the Harvard Botanical Museum who introduced me to the world of ethnobotany and medicinal plants.
Q If you had not entered your current profession, what would you have liked to do?
AW: Been a professional musician.
Q What advice would you give to someone going into complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)?
AW: Get a good grounding in conventional medicine and scientific method in order to judge the accuracy of CAM claims and theories.
Q What is the greatest danger to CAM?
AW: That it will be available only to the affluent.
Q What makes a good researcher?
AW: Open-mindedness, even to possibilities that conflict with your preconceptions.
Q What stimulates your creativity?
AW: Solitude, time in nature/wilderness, intellectual exchanges with other creative people.
Q What is your favourite dream?
AW: Imagining doctors becoming true healers.
Q What makes you happy?
AW: Flowers, great storms, my daughter, good food; seeing people get better by allowing healing to happen.
Q What depresses you?
AW: The news.
Q What is your biggest regret?
AW: Not having learned to play a musical instrument. Not having learned more languages when young.
Q What do you deplore in yourself?
AW: Laziness.
Q What do you deplore in others?
AW: Talking too much and not listening.
Q What was the most embarrassing moment in your life?
AW: Showing up drunk at black radio station in Philadelphia to be honoured as Teenager of the Week (this was in 1959 when I was 17, following a high-school graduation party).
Q What is your favourite book/film?
AW: Film: Casablanca. Book: – too hard, I have too many favourites – The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu (Witter Bynner translation), Lost Horizon (James Hilton).
Q If you were invited on the Jerry Springer show – why would this be?
AW: I don’t want to think about it.
