Our Own Healing Power with Andrew Weil, MD

[00:00:00] Dr. Andrew Weil: But I think if we could give people, starting as kids, you know, confidence in their body's potential for healing, we would become less dependent on medical interventions of all sorts.

[00:00:12] Dr, Melinda Ring: This is Next Level Health. I'm your host, Dr. Melinda Ring, Director of the Osher Center for Integrative Health at Northwestern University. On this show, we explore ways to take actionable steps towards optimizing our health with leaders in the integrative, functional, and lifestyle medicine fields who believe in science backed and time tested approaches to well being. Let's take your health to the next level.

[00:00:43] Dr. Melinda Ring: Today's guest, Dr. Andrew Weil, is more than a household name. He is the father of integrative medicine and a driving force in shifting both public and professional attitudes toward the field. He's someone that I claim, like so many others, as the person whose work has most greatly inspired my own career in integrative health, not to mention the impact on my personal well being. When Dr. Weill first began publishing books and research more than 50 years ago, many thought his work was on the fringe of the medical world. Now it's clear his approach to health and healing was visionary. Today, the University of Arizona Andrew Weill Center for Integrative Medicine, which he founded in 1994, is regarded as the global leader in innovative integrative education.I personally graduated from his fellowship in 2004. It was the first advanced training for physicians to gain expertise in this burgeoning field, and it continues to train hundreds of health professionals every year. I am delighted to have him on the show today to discuss the evolution of the field, the importance of education, and maybe what's next in integrative medicine, and all kinds of topics, anything he's interested in exploring. So welcome, Andy.

[00:02:05] Dr. Andrew Weil: Thank you, Melinda. It's good to see you. I'm very happy to be here.

[00:02:10] Dr. Melinda Ring: So, in learning about you and your history, I know that plants are very important to you, and that sounds like it started at a really early age. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, how you got into plants? Plants as medicine, plants as healing, planetary health is so important right now, food as medicine,

[00:02:34] Dr. Andrew Weil: Well, my love of plants came from my mother, and hers came from her mother. And, uh, from a very early age um, I got interested in growing things in the house, having a small garden in back of our row house, and eventually that led me to be a botany major as an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1960s, and I had the very good fortune to have as a mentor Richard Evans Schultes, who was director of the Harvard Botanical Museum and is considered the father of modern ethnobotany.And he really got me interested in medicinal plants, and that has been a career focus of mine. You know I I have consistently seen that Botanical remedies are different and often superior to isolated chemical constituents. Uh, That's something I've tried to teach people about over the years.I've met enormous resistance to that from pharmacologists and physicians. But I think that's now changing. And the fact is that these complex botanical products, I think, interact with the body differently from the drugs that we commonly use in medicine. Like they are generally safer and often have better effects.And I could go on at length about that, but that's been, you know I, used to say when I was actively practicing that for every prescription I wrote, For a pharmaceutical drug, I probably gave out 40 recommendations for botanical remedies, and in that time, I never saw a single adverse reaction to any of the natural products that I recommended.And I, as you know, adverse reactions to medications are an enormous problem in conventional medicine.

[00:04:15] Dr. Melinda Ring: you've talked about this complexity and how it's sort of integral to integrative medicine to whole person medicine. It's like recognizing the complexity versus just trying to simplify things to a single thing

[00:04:29] Dr. Andrew Weil: Our medicine and science are very um, wedded to reductionism. And uh, reductionism is a tool. It makes things simpler. It makes things easier to study. But the assumption that the part is equal to the whole is just not so. And that often when you reduce things, you lose relevance to the real world.Uh, The human body is the ultimate tool. , And, but most of the drugs that we use in conventional medicine are counteractive drugs. They counteract physiological processes. And you can get a sense of that by seeing that, you know, most of the kinds of drugs we use begin with the prefix anti We use anti hypertensives, antidepressants, anti spasms.Anti this, anti that. It's nice to have these things available if the body is very out of balance, you want to get it back in balance quickly. But if you rely on these kinds of medications over time, the body pushes back against them. You know, that's the homeostatic reaction. And that often gets you into worse trouble than you had to begin with.And this is a pattern that I see. You know, with many of the drugs that we use long term, with antidepressants, with the drugs we use for GERD, whereas with the botanicals I don't see that. And that has something to do with the fact that you're not giving these single compounds.

[00:05:48] Dr. Melinda Ring: Well, so I'm curious. Thinking now, because even in sort of the westernization of herbalism, we do see the promotion of single compounds like berberine, for example. Do you think that, how do you, how would you compare that versus, because it's almost to me like a pharmaceutical at that point where it is pulling out a single compound.

[00:06:14] Dr. Andrew Weil: these have their place but I, but it's important to recognize that they're different from the complex mixtures. I can give you, you know, a very dramatic example. One of the plants that I have studied for many years is coca leaf, the source of cocaine. And coca is the chief natural remedy of millions of Andean Indians. They use it as their main GI remedy. And they say it treats both diarrhea and constipation. That makes no sense in terms of western pharmacology. Cocaine is a gut stimulant, so obviously it would be great for constipation, but what could it do for diarrhea except make it worse? But coca has 14 other alkaloids in it that have a similar molecular structure to cocaine.And that's it. Molecular structure is very interesting and strange. It looks like drugs like scopolamine and atropine that come from plants like nightshade, belladonna. Those are gut paralytics and have been used in medicine like that. So my guess is that some of these alkaloids, you know, stimulate the gut and others paralyze the gut.So it's a mixture with ambivalent potential. What does the body do when you throw this mixture in? I think it decides what it needs, you know, and that's not. Mystical, it may have to do with what receptors are available for binding at the moment. And I think this is something that I see with many of these complex mixtures.They have push and pull compounds in them. And treating the body That way is fundamentally different from giving it a unidirectional shove in one direction. You know, you're letting the body decide, participate in the therapeutic equation. And I think that's one reason why these complex mixtures often have better effects.

[00:07:58] Dr. Melinda Ring: That reminds me of the whole class of plants, the adaptogenic herbs, which are really more harmonizing than necessarily in and of themselves stimulating or anything, and they're such a popular class of herbs right now because of all the stress in the world.

[00:08:12] Dr. Andrew Weil: And they were very unknown in Western medicine, you know, these, this was, the term adaptogen was coined by Soviet scientists, I think back in the 1950s looking at plants like Siberian ginseng and ginseng, there's a range of them now. These are non toxic natural substances that generally increase the body's resistance to stress to help it adapt to the environment.And um, they can be used over time. And I think many people find them very valuable.

[00:08:42] Dr. Melinda Ring: So, do you have a favorite plant or herbal remedy that you know, would say, like I get to take one to three on an island with me, like what do I, what am I going to

[00:08:58] Dr. Andrew Weil: Well, one would be garlic, which I think is a miraculous plant. You know, it has antibiotic activity, antifungal, uh, Lowers blood pressure. I think it has many many things to recommend and quite safe. Another one that I uh, use regularly is valerian, which is, I think, the safest natural sedative. Uh, It's been used for centuries in European medicine.You know it it is not, doesn't produce dependence. It has really very few side effects and it's very good at promoting sleep and relaxation. Let me think if I can think of another one that I would use. You know, I'm a great fan of peppermint. You know, I think it's delicious and it also relaxes the smooth muscle in the GI tract and can be very useful for spasmodic conditions. You know, the reason that people eat after dinner mints is that it relaxes the stomach if you've eaten too much and your stomach is distended.

[00:10:00] Dr. Melinda Ring: Yes, so we can talk about food. So I, because I feel like since we sort of started on this theme of the whole is more than the parts, it also, I, you know, you were really so ahead of the game in talking about the concept of the anti inflammatory diet and the root cause, the role of inflammation in pretty much everything from depression to heart disease and anything that's an itis. And it's a whole way of eating, but now we've got all these different trends, low carb, low protein, high protein, like the trend right now is I gotta eat 150 grams of protein a day regardless of what else is going on. How would you counsel people about diet?.

[00:10:46] Dr. Andrew Weil: the simplest advice I can give to people is to stop eating refined, processed and manufactured foods. I mean, that's it in a nutshell. It's those things which are doing us in. And you know, Michael Pollan wrote that our great grandparents wouldn't even recognize his food, what most people eat today.And, these refined processed and manufactured foods are full of ingredients that are not good for us, that promote inflammation among other things. So I think when we take foods as nature produces them and we transform them, the likelihood is that we're going to reduce their nutritive qualities and increase their dangerous qualities. And I think that is, is the dramatic change that's happened in our society. So that's the main thing that I recommend. And that's the first step of the anti inflammatory diet also to stop eating refined processed and manufactured foods.

[00:11:40] Dr. Melinda Ring: Real food. So you've promoted the whole concept of the anti inflammatory diet, even creating a whole anti inflammatory pyramid. Have you seen any uptake in that when it comes to national guidelines like the USDA standardized guidelines and diet for Americans?

[00:11:58] Dr. Andrew Weil: not sure it's made it into that yet, but I do see, you know, it is commonly referenced now when there are periodically lists of the best diets that are recommended, the anti inflammatory diet tends to be in there. You know the USDA Recommendations are heavily influenced by industry and that's a problem. When the pyramid was revised a few years ago, the dairy industry, it got, managed to get this serve, recommended service of dairy increased from three to four a day. And there was no opposition to that from the medical community. So, you know, I'm not sure we can rely on the government here.You know, the government also tells us to eat whole grain foods, but they let products that are made from flour. Which are not whole grain foods, say they're whole grain and good for you, you know, whole grains means you can see the grains. Yeah,

[00:12:51] Dr. Melinda Ring: talking about, you know, you're saying, well, the government may have influences that make it not the most reliable source and training a generation, generations of health professionals, coaches, et cetera, has been a real, I think, mission of yours for decades now and, despite that. As somebody at an academic institution, I think it, many schools still really don't have any robust programs, even in our center, where I think we have, you know, one of the top integrative programs. It's not a mandatory part of the curriculum. So how would you like to see the future physicians, future health professionals change? Do you think that is even feasible? given all of the pressures on the academic

[00:13:44] Dr. Andrew Weil: I think it's feasible for two reasons. First, the consumer demand for integrative medicine is overwhelming and secondly, the current health care system in our country is going down the tubes, and I think it's going to completely collapse. So I think the economic pressures as well as that consumer demand are going to make for change. The great promise of integrated medicine is that it can enhance outcomes and lower costs. And it can lower costs in two ways. One is by shifting the focus from disease management to health promotion and disease prevention. And secondly, by bringing into the mainstream treatments that are not dependent on expensive technology, including pharmaceuticals.As you know, Nutrition continues to be slighted in the training of physicians. The total instruction I got in four years at Harvard Medical School was 30 minutes, which we're grudgingly allowed to a dietician at one hospital I worked at to tell us about special diets we could order for patients. That has not changed a lot since I've been out of medical school. You know, when nutrition is taught now, It's generally taught as biochemistry and it's forgotten as soon as the biochemistry exams are over. So I think, you know, that I think physicians are largely illiterate about nutrition. It's not their fault. They weren't taught it. And there haven't even been places that they could go to remedy that until relatively Recently. I mean, what could be more important than, you know, it's so obvious that how you eat is a fundamental influence on health and disease risk. It's just amazing to me that it has been so neglected.

[00:15:22] Dr. Melinda Ring: Yeah, I feel like nutrition and mind body medicine. Both of those are in this bucket of more lifestyle medicine approaches, and I think they're at least more palatable to conventional medicine as compared to things like, say, homeopathy

[00:15:38] Dr. Andrew Weil: Nutrition is a curious one. I've been, you know, how could it be that this is not paid attention to? My only explanation for that is that to the academic medical mind, and I'm tempted to say to the male academic medical mind, nutrition looks like home economics. It does not look like pharmacology or biochemistry or real science. The mind body stuff, this is a little more complicated. And this has to do with the materialistic paradigm that dominates Western science and medicine. And in materialistic philosophy, all that is real is that which is physical. You know, what you can touch, see, measure. If you observe a change in a physical system, materialist philosophy says the cause has to be physical. Non physical causation of physical events is not allowed for. And when we talk about mind body medicine, you know, we are talking about non physical influences on the physical body. And that does not compute. So there's, that is a, is a harder one to get around.

[00:16:39] Dr. Melinda Ring: again, I do feel like we've seen a little more acceptance with the increased awareness of burnout in the field, like medical trainee burnout, trainee and physician suicides, it seems like there's more attention being thrown that way, although sometimes to the detriment, because then it can be like, Oh, just meditate. It's not the system's problem. You just need to learn to manage your stress better.

[00:17:03] Dr. Andrew Weil: Also been research supporting a lot of this, especially, you know, using functional MRIs of living brains and all the research on mindfulness. Beginning someone breathing. So there is now like growing body of data supporting these kinds of interventions.

[00:17:19] Dr. Melinda Ring: So, speaking of data, can you tell me your opinion or thoughts on how research is or isn't necessary? Some of the complexities in the field, you know, what types of evidence are, you know, do we, should we really be looking for and valuing?

[00:17:41] Dr. Andrew Weil: Well, that's a big question and an interesting one. You know, first of all, I think a lot of the research that's being done is of very little value. You know, if you look at the You know, I don't think we need more randomized controlled trials to see whether St. John's wort works better than a placebo. You know, we need outcomes and effectiveness studies in which you compare integrative treatment to conventional treatment. What I would like to see, you know, make a list of the 12 commonest conditions that absorb most of our healthcare dollars where we think integrative medicine can shine. Things like, you know, back pain , asthma, migraine, GERD, and then You get groups of patients matched for age, gender, and diagnosis. One goes to conventional treatment, one goes to integrated treatment. And you track outcomes of medical outcomes, cost outcomes, patient satisfaction. That's the kind of data that we can take to the people who pay for health care to show them why it's in their interest. to reimburse for integrative medicine. Now, one of the problems, you know, when you look at, first of all, these are not easy studies to do because you need large numbers of patients. They're costly. NIH doesn't see it within its mission to do this. You know, who's going to do it? But I think this is a very high priority. Another problem that confounds conventional researchers is that integrative treatments by nature are complex. You know, we may give one patient a dietary change and an exercise program and a mind body thing and a botanical remedy. Most researchers want to study one intervention and they don't want to study, you know, complex ones, especially when they may differ from patient to patient. But this is a, you know, this is, we have to do this. It's crucial.

[00:19:26] Dr. Melinda Ring: You've mentioned the public driving this. Yes. into the medical school, sort of the bottoms up kind of approach. I feel like you've also felt like corporations, like big business, like they maybe have a more vested interest than the healthcare system itself has, because I think the healthcare system in a way doesn't necessarily want to prevent people from exactly. Yeah. tests and procedures. So, yeah, so how would you

[00:19:58] Dr. Andrew Weil: Well, corporations, I think, are hobbled by healthcare costs, and they're looking for solutions, and they're also not bound by ideology. They don't care, you know, where something comes from. They just want methods that? work. So, I would hope we could enlist corporations, at least in setting up some of these pilot studies to get outcomes and effectiveness data.

[00:20:20] Dr. Melinda Ring: I seem to recall something that University of Arizona partner had done where a chiropractor was embedded, maybe in an auto industry or in one of those industries and actually showed a decrease in cost, decrease in time off work. So yeah, it feels like that's the kind of work we need done.

[00:20:40] Dr. Andrew Weil: One of the great obstacles to the growth of integrative medicine is our priorities of reimbursement, which I think are completely backward. We happily pay doctors to intervene, to give medications. We don't pay them to sit with a patient and teach them breathing exercises or advise them about how to eat or how to exercise. And the only way that's going to change is if we can convince the people who've paid for health care that it's in their interest to do that, that it's going to save them money, which I believe we can do, but we have to get that kind of data.

[00:21:10] Dr. Melinda Ring: you know, the Integrative medicine, you know, this has been around now for decades. This term, it's been, you know, as you know, the Academic Consortium for Integrative Health and Medicine, now expanded, now it's an international organization of academic centers. Alongside that, we've seen these related fields like functional medicine, lifestyle medicine, anti aging medicine longevity medicine. I mean, you can keep throwing all of these out there. How do you see those playing or are they creating a problem for each other by, you know, trying to be the one?

[00:21:54] Dr. Andrew Weil: First of all, I've always said that one day we'll be able to drop the word integrative and it'll just be good medicine. But of the ones you've mentioned, these are very different. Lifestyle medicine, I think, is a very legitimate field and there's broad overlap with integrative medicine. Lifestyle medicine is one component of integrative medicine and I think there's great potential for our organizations to work together. Anti aging medicine, I think, is a scam, and uh, you know I, I advise people to have nothing to do with it. I think it's a waste of time to try to stop the aging process, and that what people should be worrying about is how to maintain health as you get older. So it's about healthy aging, not anti aging. Functional medicine is a little more complicated to talk about. Again, I think there are areas of overlap with integrative medicine, but there are aspects of functional medicine that bother me. One is over reliance on biochemical mechanisms, which may not have clinical relevance, overuse of, or diagnostic tests that are not validated over, over recommendation and prescription of products which the practitioners often make money from selling. And I think in general, not paying enough attention to the non physical aspects of people, to mind body medicine, to spiritual aspects of health, to community things. So I think integrative medicine is a much more robust system. academically based, which will say I that's just, that's my prejudice there.

[00:23:32] Dr. Melinda Ring: felt very similarly to you much earlier in my career. I think that they have come much more closely together at this point, you know, and which is good. You know, I think even I'm seeing organizations collaborate, academic consortiums collaborate with some of these, um, uh, you know, like minded organizations. So I do hope we can come together because We're still such a little piece of medicine as a whole that all of us who are really passionate about prevention and root cause type things, you know, I think that's, you know, we got to work together.

[00:24:12] Dr. Andrew Weil: Yeah, our center has now, you know, it's, we've graduated, uh, almost 3, 000, uh,physicians from our two year fellowship. That's real numbers. It's still a drop in the bucket, but it's real

[00:24:24] Dr. Melinda Ring: exactly.

[00:24:25] Dr. Andrew Weil: hope is that, you know, if they come together and begin to work for political action and social change, they could make a difference.

[00:24:35] Dr. Melinda Ring: So you mentioned your healthy aging, just to shift a little bit, which was to me, you know, so. Yeah. First, integrative medicine, then the concept of anti inflammatory diet, your interest in the real therapeutic potential of cannabis and psychedelics, which is so hot now. and then you wrote your healthy aging book and now like in the past two years, there's been all these healthy aging longevity books. I feel like you're talking to something who's giving you the

[00:25:08] Dr. Andrew Weil: Yeah. 

[00:25:09] Dr. Melinda Ring: on what's going to come down the

[00:25:10] Dr. Andrew Weil: I've been very good if I look back at my history of saying things, writing about things, really some years before it catches on. . Look at the anti inflammatory diet. I first, I first, began talking about that, I think, in the 1980s. and I was just seeing things in the medical literature that caught my attention that suggested that chronic low level inflammation was a common root of many serious diseases.And then I was thinking about, well, what are the influences on inflammation? And clearly one of them is how we eat. And we have, Total control over that. So, I think I was one of the first people to talk about, you know, that and the possibility of designing an anti-inflammatory diet. So, yes, I don't know. I don't know how to do that.

[00:26:44] Dr. Melinda Ring: You've got some crystal balls, something is tuning in. How about, um, just because they are so popular now and, and the legality is under scrutiny. How about some of the substances like cannabis and psychedelics? Where did your interest in those come from and where do you see it going?

[00:27:05] Dr. Andrew Weil: My, this was my early work, you know, back in the 1960s, 1970s, and uh, you know, I was writing about this, talking about it, experimenting with them, and so forth. I can't believe it's taken this long for, you know, for me. You know, the general public to be aware that these have great potential. We still have to get them out of these restrictive drug schedules and make them available. I think the cannabis and the psychedelics are very different though. You know cannabis is a very one of the most complex botanicals. There are many different Components there, I don't think we understand all of them. It's quite safe in terms of, you know, really almost absence of toxicity. But when patients ask me about using cannabis, I really don't often know what to tell them. I don't know what products to suggest. And there's such A very variation of individual response to it. You know, I know people who can smoke pot before they go to bed and say it facilitates sleep and other people who say if they smoke pot in your bedtime, they can't sleep the whole night. So you have this, I mean, that, that is, that makes it a difficult drug to use medically to know how to recommend it. But I think, you know, a couple of things. It's lack of toxicity. It's worth experimenting with many people for many conditions. Psychedelics on the other hand these are, I think have tremendous therapeutic potential and almost zero physical toxicity. You know, the main dangers of them are psychological and that has to do with setting and how the experience is structured, but I'm a little disappointed that all the interest in them has been focused on psychiatric conditions.  Because I think there's tremendous potential there for use in general medicine for managing autoimmunity, for example. A range of chronic conditions. I've just seen remarkable treatments. Remissions, changes in people, sometimes as a result of one psychedelic experience. So, yeah, fascinating. And then there's the whole, I mean, you know, in some ways, I think maybe that's the only thing that can save our society from disaster right now, where we seem to be headed very rapidly. You know, we need some sort of change of consciousness on a large scale and those agents are capable of doing that.So I think there's an unstoppable momentum to this at the moment. Before the pandemic, when I was traveling a lot and speaking, Wherever I was and whatever I was talking about, whether it was healthy aging, anti-inflammatory diet, integrative medicine, I would get questions about psychedelics. You know, where can we get them? How do we use them? So this is, it's going to happen.

[00:29:44] Dr. Melinda Ring: Yes, it's on the New York Times health page about how the businesswomen are, microdosing before they go to work for creativity and it's just so prevalent now. I, you know, as a health professional, I struggle with the same thing you do. You mentioned that I will certify patients to receive medical cannabis, but I can't guide them, you know, and it is a little bit of an experimentation. And the same thing where I do see the therapeutic potential for these psychedelics, but it's not so easy as writing a prescription for Zoloft, you know, or whatever. You know, a much much looser field in terms of helping to guide patients. So I hope there's more research in this area to help.

[00:30:37] Dr. Andrew Weil: Our center has a curriculum now, in therapy use of psychedelics. We have online courses both for health professionals and for the general public. And there's been tremendous demand for this from. people we train. So I think there's a, you know, the current generation of physicians, they really want to know how to use these.

[00:30:58] Dr. Melinda Ring: Yeah, patients are asking. So, so, you've come up with all of these things. Do you, are you writing another book? Do you have another idea? You know, like, what is going to be this, you know, in five, ten years, we're going to be like, he was the first one to

[00:31:14] Dr. Andrew Weil: You know, I think I'm done. I'm done writing. I've written enough. I don't want to write another book. I enjoy teaching. When I go back and read my, you know, older stuff I've written, it's all there. You know, I think I've said everything I have to say, but I really, you know, I think, getting to see the acceptance of mind body medicine as a major The goal of mine wanting to see physicians become literate in nutrition,

[00:31:43] Dr. Melinda Ring: Yeah,

[00:31:44] Dr. Andrew Weil: be able to act politically to counteract those, you know, industrial pressures that now exist. You know, last I checked, something like 48 percent of US hospitals have fast food restaurants on their premises. I mean, that's not acceptable. You know, and why aren't doctors doing something about this? And it's because they, you know, they aren't, it's not in their consciousness. So I really want to see all that change. And I would love to see the other thing that I feel very strongly about and that I've tried to put in my writings and talking. I think most people have very little confidence in the body's ability to heal itself. And I think that is so important. And, you know, to me, the first. A first course in medical school should be about the body's healing system. You know, and I never heard anything, I don't think I heard the word healing used in my medical training, except in the phrase wound healing. But I think if we could give people, starting as kids, you know, confidence in their body's potential for healing, we would become less dependent on medical interventions of all sorts. And I think one of the main jobs that I see as a doctor is to convey that to people. Over the years, I have had many patients come to me who I'd seen sometime in the past, who've said to me, the most important thing you did for me is you were the only doctor I saw who told me I could get better. I mean, that makes me sad in a way, but you know but I believe that. And sometimes I'll tell people, I don't know exactly how you can get better. I'll give you things to try and things you have to experiment with, but I know that you can get better.

[00:33:22] Dr. Melinda Ring: Yes, I think that's true. That therapeutic partnership, the therapeutic alliance, that sense of hope, you know, you can just see it when a patient enters the room after they've been through the mill and just the change in their energy, their mood. And to me, I'm sure that something must be happening, even at that chemical level to stimulate healing at that point. Yes. Yeah, it's just so important.

[00:33:49] Dr. Andrew Weil: So that's one of my missions.

[00:33:50] Dr. Melinda Ring: So, obviously, you've created a lot. You've impacted so many people. What's the legacy that you're hoping to leave at

[00:33:59] Dr. Andrew Weil: Well, you know, I'm very happy that our center is very robust, we have a wonderful new building you know, we are growing I want to reach out to, you know, other institutions, to other countries to stimulate this kind of, you know, movement. And I think it's both a matter of educating the general public and then training more health professionals. And working for change. I think change, as it's inevitable, time is on our side. You know, however bleak it looks at times, but I think the healthcare system is not going to get better. It's going to implode. The unhappiness of patients and physicians is at an all time high. I mean, every patient I know that's had an interaction with the healthcare system in the past few years has been really unhappy. And many physicians I know are equally unhappy. I hear, when I was going into medicine, when I was in medical school, medicine looked like a very attractive field. And one of the, one of the reasons was it gave you the promise of autonomy. You could be your own boss. That's

[00:35:03] Dr. Melinda Ring: Oh, I can't even imagine.

[00:35:04] Dr. Andrew Weil: Now you're told what treatments you can and can't prescribe, how many patients you have to see. I mean, there's general unhappiness out there. And I think that's very much working in our favor.

[00:35:16] Dr. Melinda Ring: We're also seeing that many physicians are, leaving just, you know, primary care and others going into concierge, direct pay practices, and that links to this idea about access and health equity because a lot of the practices, like say acupuncture, things like dietary supplements, they're just not covered by insurance. They're not covered by Medicaid. Do you see some sort of solution? How can we bridge that gap?

[00:35:43] Dr. Andrew Weil: Well, that, that goes back to that general problem of priorities of reimbursement, and as I said, the only way that's going to change is if we convince the people who pay for healthcare that it's in their interest to pay for integrative approaches. You know I often hear people say, well, you know, to do this kind of stuff, you have to be affluent. You know, you have to shop at Whole Foods. That's not really true. Some of the things that we recommend breathing techniques are free. You know, learning,

[00:36:09] Dr. Melinda Ring: Yeah,

[00:36:10] Dr. Andrew Weil: walk is free. You know, some very healthy foods like beans are cheap. There are ways you can show people to move in the direction of a healthier lifestyle that don't cost a lot of money.

[00:36:22] Dr. Melinda Ring: So to finish up here, are there any pearls of personal wisdom that you would share with our listeners to help them reach their own next level of health?

[00:36:31] Dr. Andrew Weil: Well, I would say overall, it's like really be aware of and focus on how Remarkable. The body is at maintaining health? You know, when you think of all the things that could go wrong inside and all the things out there that are potentially harmful, it is miraculous that most of us are mostly healthy most of the time. And that's because the body is doing this for us. You know, it is our remarkable healing system. And you want to be aware of that, take care of it, find out the basic things that you want to do to maintain that as you go through life, including, you know, Not eating refined processed and manufactured foods and having regular physical activity and letting good influences into your mind. It's simple stuff, but I think that's the main thing I would tell people.

[00:37:19] Dr. Melinda Ring: Yeah, appreciate the body and nurture it. And I know you would also say, look into your dog's eyes.

[00:37:28] Dr. Andrew Weil: I can't imagine life without dogs.

[00:37:32] Dr. Melinda Ring: I agree. Mine is sitting right below my feet all the time. Well, thank you. Thank you

[00:37:38] Dr. Andrew Weil: Yeah. Pleasure.

[00:37:39] Dr. Melinda Ring: taking time to connect today. You know, again you're one of my inspirations, mentors so many people. So thank you for all that you have done.

[00:37:51] Dr. Andrew Weil: And yeah

[00:37:52] Dr. Melinda Ring: touched so many people's lives.

[00:37:53] Dr. Andrew Weil: You're right. You know, I follow all that you do and I'm very proud that you were one of our graduates.

[00:38:00] Dr. Melinda Ring: Yes, thank you. Wouldn't be here without you. Thank you for joining me on this episode of Next Level Health. I hope you found some inspiration and practical insights to enhance your wellness journey. Don't forget to leave a comment on YouTube or review on Apple Podcasts. I'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions for future topics or speakers. Be sure to follow Next Level Health with me, Dr. Melinda Ring, as we continue exploring the path to healthier, happier lives, together.