MAINSTREAM MEDICINE'S SERENE REBEL

Andrew Weil's cherubic countenance is recognizable to millions. His kindly
eyes, peaceful expression, fluffy beard and shining dome shout health and
wellness, his twin passions.

While more traditional -- and far less famous -- doctors grapple with
managed-care strictures, insurance woes and declining public trust, Weil
seems blissfully unaffected.

In fact, with eight best-selling books under his belt, a citation as one of
Time magazine's 25 most influential people, a Web site racking up an
estimated 2 million hits a month and a clinic with a waiting list of 1,500
patients, Weil seems to have reached physician nirvana.

But not all is well in Weilville. Like another rebel doctor before him --
Benjamin Spock -- the paterfamilias of alternative medicine has drawn the
ire of peers who disagree with his medical philosophies.

Ironically, Weil's staunchest and most media-ready nemesis is one of his
former Harvard Medical School instructors: professor emeritus Arnold
Relman, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"I taught that man physiology, and what he says about respiration will make
me prematurely gray," said Relman about Weil, who wrote and recorded an
audio CD, "Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing" (Sounds True, 1999).

Relman and other traditional medicos express irritation that Weil might
consider alternative healing methods such as homeopathy, therapeutic touch
and what Relman calls "that nonsense mind-body stuff" as potentially
curative as traditional medicine. They chastise him for not publishing
research in peer-reviewed journals to prove the modalities work. And they
blanch at the thought of adding such subjects to medical-school curricula.

"He had the advantage of a Harvard education," said Relman, who wrote a
nearly 9,000-word jeremiad about Weil in the New Republic. "This is a guy
who ought to know better."

At the mention of his former teacher's name, Weil sighs. "It seems he is
quite obsessed with me," he said. "And the only reason I can think of for
it is that I'm an articulate, credentialed spokesperson." When prodded
further, Weil confides, "I really think he's a dinosaur."

Weil's decades-long refusal to conform to the American medical
establishment's dogma has earned him considerable controversy. After
completing studies in ethnobotany, Weil attended Harvard Medical School.
While there, he explored marijuana's medicinal uses--and later drew public
denunciation for having done so from Vice President Spiro Agnew.

Upon graduating in 1968, Weil found himself disenchanted with his
medicalschool training. He believed he had been taught to treat symptoms,
rather than to look for underlying causes of disease, he later wrote in
"Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural
Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself" (Knopf, 1995). He also had been
trained to rely on pharmaceuticals and all but ignore the body's ability to
heal itself.

From 1969 to 1973, Weil traveled through Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and
Colombia, among other countries, to study medicinal plants, belief-based
healing and shamanism. The world became his classroom, and he returned to
the United States with new ideas: Altered consciousness--induced through
trances, meditation, ritual magic, hypnosis and psychedelic drugs--could
generate powerful insights and foster healing. The mind could cause
sickness--or produce health.

Perhaps if Weil had remained in South America, sampling psychoactive
mushrooms and chewing yoco vines, his conservative foes could have ignored
him. But Weil rankled them by declaring war on their medical practices and
teachings. While churning out bestsellers and propounding alternative
health treatments over the years, he concurrently announced that he
intended to try to overhaul medical-school curricula and establish
"integrative medicine"--the amalgamation of carefully selected conventional
Western and alternative health treatments--as a new medical school discipline.

A battle of words, mostly dauntingly polysyllabic and technical, ensued.
Conservative physicians and researchers contended that Weil was attempting
to mainstream quackery.

Weil countered that his goal was to find better treatments for maladies
that hadn't responded well to allopathic protocols. These include
allergies, chronic skin problems, cancers, digestive ailments, autoimmune
disorders, chronic degenerative disease and stress-related ailments. To
accomplish this, he said, he would explore the efficacy of homeopathic,
naturopathic, herbal and osteopathic remedies, among other nontraditional
offerings.

His aim is not to abolish conventional medical practices, he stressed, but
to add to physicians' healing arsenals.

"Twenty years ago, Andy wasn't part of mainstream medicine," said James
Dalen, dean of the University of Arizona College of Medicine, where Weil
runs the Center for Integrative Medicine. "But today he is. He hasn't lost
touch with it. There are some who turn against it when they get involved in
[alternative medicine], but Andy's not that way."

Weil said that during his continuing investigations he intends to adhere
strictly to the Hippocratic oath's commandment "Above all, do no harm."

"If I hear of a treatment based on a testimonial, my first concern is, will
it hurt people?" he said. "Then I ask, is it plausible? Can it work? If I'm
assured of these, I might be willing to experiment with it."

Weil also hopes to foster greater understanding of the mind-body
connection, something more than a few medicos dismiss as New Age hooey.
Weil contends that this non-physical healing process has been demonstrated
countless times to researchers in the form of the placebo effect: Test
subjects, believing they have been given cures for their ailments, somehow
improve in health, though no medicines have been administered to them.

"It's the meat of medicine, a pure healing response," Weil said. "And yet
they dismiss it."

Weil founded the Center for Integrative Medicine in 1993. Years ago, he
would have cited being ahead of his time as his bailiwick, but now, because
the culture appears to be catching up with him in its appraisal of
medicine, he names fund-raising for the center as his premier challenge.

Meanwhile, he's making strides in his medical school reform campaign.

Recently, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Minnesota,
Harvard and the University of Maryland have followed the University of
Arizona in establishing integrative centers and programs. Collectively, as
the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine, they
are exploring ways to standardize curricula.

"And we want to gradually bring other schools in," Weil said.

Someday, Weil may retire to garden or run a cafe, he said. But until then,
from his ranch at the foot of the Rincon mountains outside Tucson, he'll
continue to lead the crusade for integrative medicine.

Andrew Weil's Tips for Workplace Health:

1. Stay physically active. Take stairs instead of elevators. Park far from
your office so you can enjoy brisk walks to and from work.

2. Learn about and use basic breathing techniques. I can't emphasize enough
the value of this.

3. Educate yourself about nutrition. Teach yourself healthy eating habits.
There are so many unhealthy food options at most workplaces.

4. Pay attention to your caffeine intake. Monitor its effects on you.
Caffeine's effects vary tremendously among individuals.

5. Rally for better environmental health conditions in your workplace.
Improve air circulation if possible. Have plants around.