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The new age medical guru, Andrew Weil, M.D., runs an
integrative medicine program at the University of Arizona. He is a
physician with a mission to change the practice of conventional
medicine. What Dr. Weil has in mind is a synthesis of the best of
conventional and alternative medicine which he calls integrative
medicine. At present, a major thrust of Weil's work at the University
of Arizona is to develop new models of integrated medicine for training
physicians.
While Andrew Weil is best known for his interest in
alternative medicine he has authored three books which when read in
sequence clearly lays out the foundation of natural health: Health and
Healing;[1] Spontaneous Healing;[2] and Natural Health, Natural
Medicine.[3]
Weil finds that allopathic medicine is "glaringly
deficient in theory and philosophy of any sort."[1] "Lacking a clear
and unified theory, allopathy is a vast and cumbersome body of data
concerning the identification of specific, physical agents of disease
and the use of particular treatments directed against those agents."[1]
Weil points out the differences in approach to infectious diseases
between Eastern and Western medicine. He sees two problems with the
focus of the West on identifying external agents of harm and then
developing technological weapons against them: "The first is that
the Western antibacterial weapons tend to backfire and cause direct
harm. And the second and greater concern is that when you deal with
things that way, you will affect the evolution of organisms in a
direction that produces worse results than what you had to begin
with."[2] The Eastern approach, by contrast, is to focus on the
body's immune system in order to find ways of increasing the resistance
of the human body.[2]
Weil laments Western medicine's embrace of technology
and subsequent reliance on it. Treatment should work with the body, not
against it, writes Weil, adding that "what is needed is the least
invasive treatment with the maximal impact."[1] "The readiness of an
allopathic doctor to go right to the most extreme, expensive, and risky
methods without even thinking of simple, safe, and cheap ones is ...
typical of practice today. It demonstrates profound lack of faith in
the body's innate healing abilities."[1] More than that "they
encourage belief in a chimerical ideal of diagnosis-by-machine, in
which doctors would not exercise their minds at all, just feed the
results of laboratory tests into computers and let the computers select
the right treatments."[1] Weil claims that diagnosis is an art and
not science. Physicians are coming to believe "that numerical test
results relieve them of responsibility in identifying medical problems
and selecting treatments."[1]
Weil's beliefs on medical technology are similar to
those of Ivan
Illich. For Weil, it is this notion of Western medicine as a
technological science that has to be changed and be replaced with a
concept of medicine as an art.
References
- Andrew Weil, M.D., Health and Healing, Houghton
Mifflin Company, New York, 1998.
- Andrew Weil, M.D. Spontaneous Healing: How to
Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal
Itself. Fawcett Columbine, The Ballantine Publishing Group, New York,
1996.
- Andrew Weil, M.D. Natural Health, Natural Medicine: A
Comprehensive Manual for Wellness and Self-Care. Houghton Mifflin
Company, New York, 1998.
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