| Something profund is happening in U.S. medicine.
Patients increaingly unhappy with mainstream medicine are embracing treatments
that used to be looked upon as quackery. Nealy half of all Americans are
now using at leart one of the unconventional regimens or products known
collectively as "alternative medicine", and visits to alternative treatment
centers outnumber those to traditional doctors offices, clinics, and hospitals.
Mainstram medicine is beginning grudgingly to acknowledge that unconventional
protocols may have some worth after all. HMO are allowing doctors to refer
patients to chiropractors and massage therapists. |
The National Institutes of Health has establish
The National Cneter for Complementary and Alternative Medicine with a $50
million budget. And nearly all medical schools have quietly slots in thier
curricula for Oriental techniques, lectures on herbal remedies, and even
classes in yoga and medidation.
But health seekeer venturing into this alternative world find the
landscape as bewildering as it is intriguling,. Here practicioners range
from staid MDs to snake oil salesman in a world with few rules, little
scientific data, and outrageous claims. Even believers have difficulty
explaining how some of the treatments work. But the movement is huge,
the results are often confoundingly |
successful, and the eventual effects are
likely to change forever the face of American medicine.
The epicenter of this movement is a sixth-floor clinic of the teaching hospital
of Tucson's, University of Arizona College of Medicine. I'm sitting here
with Dr. Andrew Weil in a room with soft lighting, a wooden exan table,
a rug on the floor, and flowers on the table. Ämerican medicine is
in trouble". Weil tells me. "The public is frustrated. Hospitals are going
bankrupt. Medical schools are merging or laying off faculty.The whole system,
in fact, is hurtling toward economic collapse. It must change, and an integrative
approach is one answer.Weil, 58, a clinical professor of internal medicine
with two |
Harvard degrees, is probably the world's bestknown
practicing physician. Thisbald, bewhiskered revolutionary inflowered shirt
and shapeless pants, trailing a whiff of garlic behind him, is lookek upon
by his millions of followers as a one-man paradigm shift.
His eight books have sold 6 million copies, his Self Healing newsletter
has a circulationof nearly a half million. His speaking tours draw thousands.
His Web site (www.drweil.com)logs some 84,000 hist a day.
Weil's goal is nothing less than the reshaping of American health care,
to meld the best of conventional medicine with respected alternativee therapies-some
new, some thousands of years.
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