This Year At Bioneers: Dr. Andrew Weil

Earlier in the 20th century, the AmericanMedical Association controlled the medical industry. Alongside fiercely opposing national health insurance, the AMA fought domination by corporations. For well over half the century it was remarkably effective at preventing corporate competition from offering health-care services except for outlying sectors such as the drug business and medical supply companies. Laws enacted around 1900 forbade corporations from engaging in the commercial practice of medicine because, unlike a doctor, a corporation could not be licensed to practice medicine, and the commercialization of medicine conflicted with “sound public policy.”

Dr. Morris Fishbein, long-time head of the AMA, characterized the prospect of corporate medicine as “racketeering.” In truth, the AMA had a horror of corporations relegating doctors to the status of employees, shrinking to just another labor input on a corporate balance sheet.

By the 1970s, however, the critical condition of medical economics presented an irresistible growth opportunity for commercial medicine. The AMA’s failure to deliver affordable, effective health-care to a large plurality of Americans opened the gate wide for privatization. Large corporate ventures seized the opportunity, promising efficient business management to control costs.

Dr. Fishbein’s worst fears about the corporatization of medicine have been realized. Managed care has proven to be a fatally flawed system. U.S. health care costs have reached the highest per capita of any developed nation in the world while health-care quality is dismal compared with other developed nations, and 47 million people have no insurance. Managed care has more accurately become “managed profits” on an increasingly concentrated playing field.

There’s another basic systems error, a kind of original sin in our disease-care model. Most of the health advances in the 20^th century were public health measures such as clean water, air and sewage systems. Human and environmental health are one notion, indivisible. A movement called Ecological Medicine has arisen based on the recognition that advancing public health is inextricably linked to restoring ecological well-being. The first goal of medicine is to establish the conditions for health and wholeness, thus preventing disease and illness. The second goal is to cure.

Underlying that understanding is another insight. Nature has a profound and mysterious ability for self-repair, for self-healing, historically called “the healing force of nature.” It is nowhere to be found in our current disease-care system.

These are the dimensions in which Dr. Andrew Weil operates. He is perhaps the Dr. Spock of this generation of physicians. That’s Dr. Benjamin Spock, not the Spock of Star Trek, although Andy has certainly gone where no doctor has gone before.

His brilliance is matched by his courage as a physician-diplomat willing to take on the daunting task of refashioning a system in crisis.

Andy has played a central role in bringing about the historic transition to what he calls an Integrative Medicine that is willing to explore and use whatever really works, from both conventional medicine and alternative and complementary therapies. Above all, Andy treats people, not diseases.

He is one of the few doctors in the country who majored in botany at college. After graduating from Harvard Medical School in the 1960s, he worked for thirteen years on the research staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum and traveled the world to study ancient healing and medical lineages, from Ayurveda to shamanism.

Andy is best known for his prodigious output of best-selling books and lectures. The title of his brave new book speaks for itself: Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future.

But in many ways Andy’s most important work takes place in the trenches of medical education. He is Director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona. He has helped create a consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine. He is now working to change medical education to include environmental education.

Above all perhaps Andy’s mission has been to reconnect medicine with nature, and he stands as one of our wisest and most compelling advocates for the ecological health of the planet. It’s no coincidence that he’s also a passionate gardener and cook. As Erma Bombeck said, “Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died!” Andy’s plants are thriving.

Join us at the Bioneers Conference!