Word: weil
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...Weil, 55, a Harvard-educated physician, ought to know better than to tell stories like this. But Weil has a thousand of them. There's the one about the 19-year-old girl just months away from dying of a terminal blood disease who began a regimen of hypnotherapy, diet therapy and psychic healing, miraculously overcame her affliction and is now a 43-year-old mother of four. There's the one about the man apparently suffering from ulcerative colitis who did not respond to years of treatment by gastroenterologists but did respond to a therapist who manipulated his skull...
...hear the medical establishment tell it, Weil's stories are the worst kind of hooey--or, in the far more clinical but equally damning phrasing of the scientist, "merely anecdotal." Yet Weil, best-selling author, TV personality, Internet columnist and medical school instructor, intends to keep telling them. And Americans, to all appearances, are buying much of what...
...recently as two years ago, few people had even heard of Weil. Since 1995, few people haven't. Weil's newest book, 8 Weeks to Optimum Health, a familiar mix of herbal medicine and nutrition and life-style tips, is entering its eighth week at the top of the best-seller lists, with more than 650,000 copies in print. An earlier book, Spontaneous Healing, is in its 65th week on the lists, with a press run of more than 1 million. His site on the World Wide Web--cozily titled "Ask Dr. Weil"--recorded 1 million hits in April...
What distinguishes Weil from the rest is his radical eclecticism. Almost any treatment can have a place in his healing universe, so long as it doesn't cause harm...
Indeed, much of what Weil recommends is pretty simple stuff: self-administered, commonsense cures like eating less fat, getting more exercise and reducing stress. He leads readers a little farther afield when he introduces them to herbalism, acupuncture, naturopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic and hypnotism, although most of these protocols fall into the can't-hurt-could-help category. Where he may get into trouble is when he wanders farther still, uncritically endorsing treatments such as cranial manipulation that seem like folly even to many alternative-medicine believers. For skeptics looking for reasons to dismiss Weil, this kind of at-the-fringes...