Andrew Weil looks comfy. Clad in a hemp-fiber sports shirt and grungy cotton gardening pants, he's kicked off his boiled-wool clogs, propped his bare feet on his desk, and is on the phone, fielding personal questions from callers for his popular Internet audio program DocTalk. Bob seeks relief from ulcerative colitis; Weil suggests quaffing a slurry of aloe vera, activated charcoal, powdered psyllium seed, and acidophilus. Susan suffers from sinus headaches; Weil advises acupuncture. Elaine wonders if a purported natural breast-enlargement product made of eight organic herbs will promote a "womanly" figure; Weil doubts it. "Breast size is mostly genetically determined," he says. But the bad news goes down easily; Weil's basso is as warm as the Tucson, Arizona, sunshine outside his home office.
Some 2,300 miles away, on a drizzly afternoon in Philadelphia, Arnold Relman looks aggravated. Wearing a dark business suit and tie, the editor emeritus of the New England Journal of Medicine maintains a proud professorial posture as he rails against the Weil menace at the “Science Meets Alternative Medicine” conference—essentially a 200-person support-group meeting for alternative-medicine bashers. “Weil is devious,” Relman says. “He’s a manipulator. He’s a zealot, and a lot of what he says is just off the wall.” Relman’s colleague Wallace Sampson, clinical professor of medicine at Stanford, projects a slide depicting a huge pile of human excrement and a can of shoe polish. The slide sums up the conference’s thrust: Alternative-medicine proponents in general—and Andrew Weil in particular—don’t know one from the other.
Weil and Relman exemplify the escalating war for the soul of American medicine. Allopathic medicine—the modern drugs, surgery, and high-tech regimen of most M.D.’s—is under assault by a bewildering variety of so-called alternative therapies. Fed up with what they view as a heartless, invasive, confusing, expensive, and sometimes even deadly medical system, patients are swarming to chiropractors, naturopaths, herbalists, acupuncturists, and other formerly out-of-the-loop practitioners; in 1997, more Americans visited an alternative therapist than a primary-care physician. Meanwhile consumer demand for herbal medicines is skyrocketing; the American Botanical Council estimates 1997 sales at nearly $4 billion.
Even the medical establishment itself is changing. These days, 118 of the nation’s 120 medical schools offer courses in alternative therapy. Insurance companies are increasingly reimbursing for hypnotherapy, acupuncture, and similar once-fringe therapies.
How much of this change can be attributed to Weil? “The culture just caught up with me,” he says. But as a bona fide, Harvard-trained M.D., Weil has used his credibility to do plenty of pulling. His eight books have sold 6 million copies. Time magazine splashed his Santa-bearded face on its May 12, 1997 cover and later named him one of the 25 most influential Americans. “Andrew Weil’s Self Healing” newsletter has 450,000 subscribers; his Web site (www.drweil.com) garners a half-million hits per week. To anyone teetering between, say, St. John’s Wort and Prozac to ease depression, Weil’s imprimatur on the herbal choice can easily be the deciding factor.
