PERUconnections
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE
Alternative medicine encompasses a broad range of techniques, new and old, including; osteopatic hands on work, accupunture and ayurvedic hot of treatments
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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