Andrew Weil: The Healing Power of Nature

What It Takes®

Academy of Achievement

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2018

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Dr. Weil has been on a decades-long campaign to convince the medical establishment that the mind-body connection is real, and that many alternative forms of healing should be combined with conventional medicine... especially in treating diabetes, depression, and many other epidemic "lifestyle" diseases. He describes here how he developed his ideas, on a path that included Harvard Medical School and a career as an ethnobotanist, studying psychotropic drugs and traditional healing in the Amazon. He also talks about establishing the Center for Integrative Medicine, the first of its kind (there are now similar programs at the most prestigious government and academic medical institutions in the country). And he revels in seeing his approach to healing finally gain traction, after years of being dismissed as a radical by the mainstream medical world.

Transcript

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0:00.0	25 years ago you would have been hard-pressed to find mention of complementary or
0:09.3	integrative medicine at the National Institutes of Health, the biggest biomedical research agency
0:16.3	in the world, or at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
0:21.5	But today with a quick internet search, you'll find programs devoted
0:25.8	to those fields at most great medical institutions, including Harvard,
0:31.0	Stanford, Yale, and Johns Hopkins.
0:34.0	One of the main forces behind that tectonic shift,
0:38.0	Dr. Andrew Weil.
0:41.0	You know, well, I don't want to stop taking risk, and I feel I'm, you know, sort of off the path.
0:47.0	My biggest risk-taking has been in challenging academic medicine, which is a huge monolithic, often authoritarian, closed institution,
1:00.1	and I have come at that from outside and you know I think in some ways been threatening
1:05.2	to the establishment. It's been very interesting to me to watch over the course of my career
1:10.6	the larger culture catch up with me.
1:14.0	Andrew Weil has been pushing the boundaries of thinking on health and medicine for 50 years.
1:20.5	He's dragged the medical mainstream, kicking and screaming, to consider alternative approaches to healing.
1:27.0	By his definition, Integrative medicine is the intelligent combination of conventional medicine and natural and alternative therapies when appropriate.
1:39.0	He trains physicians and nurses in it, and he grinning with his signature bushy white beard and bald head. If you were about to down a
1:56.6	dozen donuts, take a pause and breathe. Dr. Weil is doing rounds on this episode of What It Takes, a podcast about passion, vision, and
2:07.8	perseverance from the Academy of Achievement.
2:11.2	I'm Alice Winkler.
2:14.0	Had a maid, this child is gifted and I heard that enough that I started to believe it.
2:19.6	If you have the opportunity, not a perfect opportunity, and you don't take it, you may never have another
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