Word: weil
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...Where Weil wins many of his critics back, however--and where the genius of his appeal may lie--is when he avoids straying from the medical fold at all. Throughout his books he concedes that for all the promise of his alternative cures, sometimes the best answer is the one consumers are most familiar with: the high-tech medicine of the industrialized West...
...field filled as much with dogmatists as doctors, this is nothing short of revolutionary. "There's a lot that conventional medicine does well," Weil says, "and in many cases, it's just what's called for. If I'm in a car accident, don't take me to an herbalist. If I have bacterial pneumonia, give me antibiotics. But when it comes to maximizing the body's natural healing potential, a mix of conventional and alternative procedures seems like the only answer...
Many mainstream physicians reject even this middle-of-the-road position, condemning Weil's books as the worst kind of medical malarkey, filled with sloppy science and tent-show miracles. What Weil sees as medicine, says Dr. Graham Woolf, a gastroenterologist at ucla-Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, "would never pass as a research protocol." Others are less troubled by Weil's science than by Weil himself, particularly the controversial positions he took earlier in his career, such as his perceived tolerance of marijuana and other recreational drugs...
Still others in the medical community are troubled by none of this, concerned not with what doctors think of Weil but with what patients think. "People respond to Andy," says Shirley Fahey, associate dean of the University of Arizona medical school, where Weil lectures on alternative medicine, "because Andy responds to them. As long as he does that, they'll keep coming to him for answers...
...newfound fame, Andrew Weil finds it easy to drop completely from sight. One of the most recognizable doctors in the country lives in one of its most private corners, at the foot of the remote Rincon Mountains in southern Arizona. To get there you have to travel about 35 miles outside downtown Tucson, along progressively rutted, flood-prone roads, until an incongruously suburban sign points you to the WEIL RESIDENCE. If Weil didn't show the way, it is unlikely you'd ever stumble across the place...