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June 28, 2018 - Dr. Oz Podcast
43:42
Dr. Andrew Weil’s Natural Plan for Longevity and Fighting Sickness

In this episode, Dr. Andrew Weil, world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, spoke with Dr. Oz to reveal his expert opinion on fighting sickness naturally. Plus, the secret to longevity that he says is so simple, everyone can start doing it right now. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Garlic has been revered for its medicinal properties around the world for thousands of years.
It works against bacteria, viruses, fungi.
In addition, it has a lot of heart protective effects.
So I have a lot of faith in garlic.
The other thing I like about garlic is it keeps people away from you.
Absolutely.
They can't give you their cold.
Hey, everyone. everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Podcast.
Dr. Andrew Weil, world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, spoke with me to reveal his expert opinion on fighting sickness naturally.
Plus, the secret to longevity that he says is so simple, everyone can start doing it right now.
I've known Dr. Weil's work for my entire career.
He went to Harvard Med, which is a great place to get your start from in 1964, and then went off, took a quick left turn, and started traveling the world.
Became a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs.
He went through North and South America and Africa.
He collected tons of information on drug use and these other cultures, medicinal plants, alternative medicines, and methods for treating disease.
And he brought all that back.
And this is really, from my perspective, is the true globalization of medicine.
And we've got global finances.
We can get money out of a bank machine anywhere in the world you want.
We've got global media.
You can listen to this program anywhere you want.
But medicine has stayed remarkably provincial.
And individuals like Dr. Weil have changed that.
Andy, what started this process for you?
Well, actually, Mehmet, it started long before I went to medical school.
In fact, I think as far back as I can remember, I was interested in plants.
That's something I got from my mother, which she got from her mother.
That led me to become a botany major at Harvard as an undergraduate and started me on a career interest in medicinal plants, which is certainly one of the roots of my interest in alternative medicine, natural medicine.
I was interested in mind-body interactions from the time that I was a teenager.
That eventually led me to take a course in medical hypnosis at Columbia, which was one of the most interesting things.
Courses I ever took.
I began reading about alternative medicine when I was in college.
And then after I finished medical school and internship, I traveled around the world for about three and a half years looking at healing practices and many other cultures.
And it was really from out of all those experiences that I put together my own blend, which I began to call integrative medicine and which I now teach.
Was there an epiphany for you at some point in those travels where you just said, my goodness, we don't know this and we should.
There's all this stuff happening here.
I think that happened even before.
I remember when I finished my clinical training, I felt very strongly that I had not learned much about how to prevent illness.
I learned a lot about how to treat it.
And it also seemed to me that a lot of the methods I've been taught did too much harm, and I had a very strong conviction that there must be another way of doing things.
And in my travels, I certainly saw other ways of doing things, some of them sensible, some of them not.
But I met some very interesting practitioners, and then one of the most influential that I met was an old osteopathic physician, a DO, who relied entirely on manipulation with his hands.
His name was Robert Fulford and he was a master of cranial therapy and he worked mostly with children.
And I have never seen anyone have more clinical success than this man and it was all with a technique that I had heard nothing about in my medical training.
So that was really revealing for me.
I've had cranial therapy done on me, and I must say, as a Western-trained physician, it is very strange to begin to feel this, if it is a cerebral spinal fluid, that's what it feels like to me, moving around.
Yeah, and I was taught in medical school, as I'm sure you were, that the cranial bones are immovable, that once the sutures fuse, there's no motion.
And one of the theories of cranial therapy is that there is subtle motion at these joints throughout life that are due to pulsations in the Brain and cerebrospinal fluid.
But, for example, this man, Fulford, he worked a lot with children that had recurrent ear infections and had been on endless cycles of antibiotics.
And he would do one session of cranial therapy, which was gentle and inexpensive, and these kids would never have another ear infection.
And he had a theory that made sense to explain how it worked, and this was just completely off the wall compared to what I had been taught.
And just again for the listeners, cranial therapy...
Actually, Andy, go ahead and explain it because you're the guru at this stuff.
Well, it's just you put...
The practitioner puts his hands on the person's head and also work is done on the spine and sacrum and it's gentle movements to free up This system to allow natural rhythms to occur within the skull and the spinal canal that these practitioners believe are essential to good health.
This is just one example of therapies that are outside the box which are worth knowing about because if we brought these in and they were available to more patients, I think this would be one way to lower healthcare costs.
I'm here with Dr. Weil, who's the Director of Integrative Health and Healing Facility at Mirabel Life in Balance Resort in Catalina, but he's also on the faculty at the University of Arizona, and he's one of the leaders in our field in bringing integrative medicine to the Western-trained physicians so we can actually understand it.
Andy, a lot of the value that I think you offer to American medicine is that you're a great translator.
You come to the field with impeccable credentials from the Western side, and then you bring to us lessons about things we know nothing of.
Take herbs for an example.
And you've written about these.
By the way, Andy Wilde, besides being on the cover of Time magazine a couple of times, has a great new book out called Healthy Aging, which I think was a wonderful and mature look at what aging is all about.
And of course, a book that has influenced me a lot, Personally, spontaneous healing, as well as eight weeks of optimal health.
So you've created this compendium of literature.
But things like herbs are difficult.
They're in a way game for doctors.
We don't understand them.
They're probably too difficult for the average consumer to start taking willy-nilly.
How do we truly incorporate them into Western practice?
Ideally, your doctor could be your guide here.
If doctors were taught this in their medical training, they would be able to guide patients through this maze of confusing products that are out there.
Another, I think, really important role is for pharmacists.
Ideally, pharmacists would be the people who educate both the physicians and patients about correct use of these natural products and how they mix or don't mix with pharmaceutical drugs.
But for that to happen, pharmacy schools really have to begin teaching.
About not only herbs, but vitamins, minerals, other dietary supplements.
And at the Program of Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, which I direct, we are working on curriculum for both physicians and pharmacists and nurse practitioners and other health professionals that teach all of this material.
So I think, you know, in the meantime, I guess...
Patients need to seek out reliable sources of information.
I've tried to put that in my books.
I also do it on my website, drwild.com.
But I think you have to recognize that it is a confusing world out there, that we don't have adequate regulation of these products.
Claims are made for things that really aren't backed up by scientific evidence.
There's a lot of products out there that are a waste of money, probably a few that are dangerous, and some that are quite beneficial, and you really need some help in being guided through that.
I'm here with Dr. Andy Weil, who's on the faculty at the University of Arizona, and as many Western physicians would argue, the major translator of integrative medicine for us.
And Weil spelled W-E-I-L, so drweil.com is a great source for folks, so if you want to find out a bit more about how to find folks in the area who are reliable sources of information.
Andy, there was an Institute of Medicine study that came out recently that argued that for every dollar we spend on pharmaceuticals in this country, it costs us a dollar to fix the problems.
I think we're going to hear more and more things like that.
First of all, I think the big pharma has overreached itself, and I think we're beginning to see a reaction against it, against both the expense of these products, their risks, and ineffectiveness, and I'm beginning to see a big backlash against the widespread use of antidepressants, for example.
I think it's very useful to know that there are alternatives out there.
Not only are there natural products like herbs and dietary supplements that are safer, but there are also drugless systems of treating many problems.
I can't tell you how many people I've seen with chronic sinus conditions who have been Amazed and delighted to find that by a dietary adjustment as simple as eliminating cow's milk and milk products, that they're able to control the problem and not need pharmaceutical intervention.
And there's many other examples like that.
So again, this comes back to making health professionals aware that there are other ways of doing things besides prescribing drugs.
You have a great book out called Healthy Aging.
Everyone's going to age, and you acknowledge that in the book.
Take us through it a tiny bit.
What was your goal for writing this book?
My impetus for writing it, there were several.
First was that I had turned 60, and that was a real milestone for me.
I'm now 64, so I was really thinking about my own age.
So you survived the book.
I survived the book and the book tour.
Secondly, I have been really bothered by the dominance of anti-aging philosophies in our culture.
And I think one representation of that, which you're very familiar with, is the rise of anti-aging medicine.
This is a movement that involves thousands of physicians who are trying to get themselves recognized as an official specialty of the AMA, like sports medicine.
I think a great deal of what's done under the banner of anti-aging medicine is silly.
I think the whole concept of anti-aging is wrong.
Aging is a universal natural process.
I think if your goal is anti-aging, you put yourself in a not good relationship with nature.
I think healthy aging begins with acceptance of the process and then figuring out How to stay healthy as you move through life.
And then also, I'm very concerned about the public health implications of our aging population.
We are seeing an unprecedented demographic change very soon.
We're going to have, the majority of our population is going to be in the ranks of the old and the oldest old.
In fact, the oldest old are now the fastest growing segment of the population.
And since it's in those age ranges that the greatest health care expenses are incurred, This spells huge trouble for our healthcare system, which is already in trouble.
So it's in everybody's interest to have the aging population figure out the strategies for staying healthy.
And to me, the big question is, as you get older, is it necessary to get sick?
Age-related disease developed very commonly in people after the age of 60, cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease like ALS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's disease.
Are these necessary consequences of aging?
I think the answer there is clearly no, that it is possible to Reduce the risk and delay the onset of those diseases by attending to all aspects of lifestyle, by paying attention to how you eat, how you exercise, how you handle stress, how you rest, how you sleep, and so forth.
And that's the kind of information I try to give people in that book.
You may feel this as well, but I often sense that when I'm speaking to an audience of people about this, they tend to be more affluent.
They tend to know a fair amount about it already.
In fact, I was giving a talk last night.
I looked around the room.
I was talking about obesity.
There was no one fat in the room.
Exactly.
How much of this is a rich man's solution, and how do we get these kinds of tools to folks?
Well, that's a very good question, and I think, you know, at the moment, integrative medicine is mostly available to the affluent, but this is a matter of reimbursement policies.
The people who pay for health care are very happy to reimburse for pharmaceutical drugs, for procedures, for diagnostic tests.
They don't reimburse for The time of a practitioner to sit down and talk to a patient about dietary change, for example.
So long range, we have to change all that.
We have to convince the people who pay for healthcare that it's in their interest.
They're going to save money if they support integrative medicine, and that will make this kind of medicine available to far more people.
In the meantime, I think that the educated, affluent sector of society that gets it will begin to pass that on to other people that they come into contact with, and I see that happening now.
You can see a lot of positive changes in the beginnings of efforts to get Junk foods out of schools, for example.
You see far more restaurants that have healthy options on menus.
You see much more organic produce around.
So I see all these trends happening, and while it's true that at the moment it's mostly the well-to-do that have access to this, it's beginning to penetrate society.
But long-range, we've got to change the mentality of people who pay for health services.
So let's take a specific element.
Take the common cold.
We're getting into a season where that's not going to be an uncommon question that both of us get asked about.
You've outlined, by the way, if you go to drweil.com, you'll see a list of five ways to stay well in the cold season.
Let me just list these out to you.
You can just go one by one.
I want to do this because this is where the rubber meets the road.
This is where folks need to actually understand what they can do.
I'm hoping we can learn from you a little bit about how you think of these and put them together.
So astralagus, garlic, eucalyptus, echinacea, and ginger.
Okay, astragalus is a Chinese herb that has been used for centuries to ward off colds and flu.
There is good research on it showing that it has antiviral and immune effects.
Modulating properties.
It's completely non-toxic.
It's relatively inexpensive.
You can get this in any health food store.
Chinese actually cook the root in soups, but you can buy standardized extracts of this in capsules that are reliable.
This can be taken every day through the cold and flu season.
I often recommend it to people who get everything going around.
I can be giving to kids.
It works very well.
So this is just a good thing to know about.
Maybe keep in your medicine chest.
Start taking in October at the beginning of flu season or the time whenever you're likely to get most colds.
Garlic has been, I think, revered for its medicinal properties around the world for probably thousands of years.
It is a very powerful germicidal agent.
It works against bacteria, viruses, fungi.
In addition, it has a lot of heart protective effects.
But I personally, if I start to feel like I'm getting a cold, which for me often begins with a scratchy throat or Or sniffles.
I will chop up finely or mash a clove or two of raw garlic and mix it with food because if you just try to put it in your mouth it burns.
So maybe put it on a piece of bread or mix it with something and eat that.
And often if I do that In the evening, I wake up and I'm fine.
So, I have a lot of faith in garlic.
The other thing I like about garlic is it keeps people away from you, so they can't give you their cold.
Okay, we're only just scratching the surface here.
We've got a lot more to go, so stay with us right after the break.
Andy has done an incredible amount of work getting Western medicine to appreciate all the value that global medicine has to offer us.
Really integrative medicine to me is that.
It allows us to bring the best from other parts of the world to our culture and likewise hopefully share what we're doing in the West with those cultures as well.
And we've now gotten to the issue of the cold.
And the common cold is something that many of us are plagued by.
Remarkably, Western medicine doesn't have a ton that it can offer that's all that useful for the average member of the population.
And there are a few herbs that Dr. Weil recommends.
And for those of you who are curious, one of the reasons that colds are more frequent in the winter is not because the cold weather causes it, but because you're in closed areas where you exchange germs more readily rather than being outside.
So by the way, another very good strategy, aside from things you can take, is washing your hands frequently.
And I think that's probably one of the most effective strategies to avoid getting respiratory infections.
Especially when you've been around people out in public, just get in the habit of washing your hands frequently.
And folks don't want to use soap and water because it can be logistically difficult.
But actually, I think holding someone's hand and looking them in the eyes is a very important gesture.
So I don't think not shaking hands is a good option for us as a society.
No, I think shaking hands is fine and just get in the habit of washing them frequently.
Exactly.
In Turkey, where I'm from, obviously, if you don't kiss someone in the cheeks twice, you're in big trouble.
And they don't seem to have more colds.
In any case, so eucalyptus.
Eucalyptus is readily available.
It's an essential oil that comes from the leaves of eucalyptus trees.
And like many things that have these strong smells from plants, it's antibacterial.
And plants produce them for that purpose.
It's part of the plant's defensive system.
Eucalyptus is a great thing to add to steam.
You can buy eucalyptus oil.
If you're in a steam room, you can put it in the steam room, or you can put it in a pot of water and boil the water and make a little tent with a towel.
And inhaling eucalyptus oil in steam is a wonderful way to soothe open The respiratory passages, and it prevents secondary bacterial infection when you have a cold.
So it's a useful thing to do.
It feels good, fun.
I agree.
It's one of the nicest things about taking a steam bath, especially if you can add some eucalyptus into it.
How about echinacea?
That's a popular antibiotic.
Echinacea has been much in the news.
This is a Native American plant, and there are many echinacea products out there.
There have been studies coming out saying it doesn't work.
Studies coming out that say it does work.
I think echinacea is useful to keep around.
I think it's mostly useful for the treatment of a cold.
It's something you can take at the first sign of a cold.
I tend to use echinacea tincture, maybe a teaspoon and a little warm water four times a day.
You can take it for a few days or so.
It's something I'd experiment with and see if it works for you.
And how about ginger?
Is that worthwhile?
Well, ginger is one of the most important medicinal plants in the world.
It's been used in many, many parts of the world for two different kinds of effects.
One is as a stomach soother, very good for motion sickness, nausea, for example.
Also as an anti-rheumatic agent for aches and pains.
And there's a great deal of work being done on ginger's anti-inflammatory effects.
It also has a heating quality, and if you've got a cold, especially one in the chest, drinking ginger tea, for example, you can make it by grating fresh ginger root into hot water.
It makes you sweat.
It opens the breathing passages.
It feels good.
It warms the body.
I think it's a good symptomatic thing for when you have a cold.
You've spoken frequently about the importance of the breath.
This is one of the main therapies that I practice and teach that is rather unique.
I learned nothing about this at Harvard Medical School.
I learned about the importance of breath from studying yoga and again from working with these old osteopathic physicians I mentioned.
I teach all patients simple breathing techniques and you'll find these in my books, on my website.
I have an audio program out.
It's called breathing, the master key to self-healing.
I think breath is the key to controlling the involuntary nervous system.
There are simple breathing techniques that lower blood pressure, correct heart arrhythmias, improve digestion, circulation.
These techniques are extremely time efficient and they're free.
Literally a minute or two of practice a day with no equipment.
There's no downside to doing this.
So it's really worth learning the basics of how to breathe properly.
There's been a lot of data in the Western literature about the importance of nasal breathing because it sucks nitric oxide down from the sinuses.
Nitric oxide, of course, is a dilating agent for the lung bed.
And I don't know if you buy into this much.
It's pretty solid stuff, actually.
Actually, I would like to know about that.
Maybe you can send me some references on it.
Well, it's one of the reasons that we focus on it in Western Medicine, obviously, is because when we put you to sleep for surgery, especially heart surgery, I have to put a tube down your throat.
So actually, none of the air going into your lungs goes by your sinuses.
Uh-huh.
So none of the nasal breathing that we know to be so helpful, and I'm going to torture you a little bit about this, because folks talk about breathing, but they don't actually really understand what it means a lot.
And so I want the listeners to be clear on what you mean by this.
But deep breathing is breathing through the nose, usually.
Yes.
Especially yogic breathing.
And explain, how do you teach people to do belly breathing, pushing the diaphragm down?
Well, the easiest way, you know, I think in our culture especially...
People are often afraid to let their bellies expand when they take a breath.
I think women, for fear of looking fat, and men because they're told that it's good to have rock-hard, flat abs, But, you know, an easy thing to do is to ask people to just put their hand on their abdomen, just below the navel, and just observe which way the hand moves when you breathe in.
When you breathe in, that hand should move out.
The belly should expand.
If it's not doing that, then you're mostly breathing with your chest And that's not allowing a full breath.
It's restricting the movement of the diaphragm and full expansion of the lungs.
So you just want to make sure that when you take a breath that that hand on your belly is moving outward.
And it can move you into the issue of credentialing now.
You're so important at so many levels in this movement.
One of the big challenges for the average listeners, how do you actually find someone who's trustworthy?
And they can go to drwild.com.
Well, first of all, another site to go to, if you go to the website of the Program in Integrative Medicine, and that's www.integrativemedicine.arizona.edu.
And there's a find a practitioner or find a PIM graduate there and a map of the U.S. will come up and there are dots where we have all of our graduates.
We have over 350 physicians who've come out of intensive training and our entering classes are now 70 and 80 a year.
So each year those dots are increasing and you can find a graduate of our program, somebody who's certified to be fully trained in integrative medicine.
I think when you're looking for other kinds of practitioners, you know, let's say an acupuncturist, somebody that does cranial therapy, there are certified credentialing organizations for these techniques.
But I think it's the same way you find an MD. You know, you rely on word-of-mouth recommendations from people you trust.
Then you meet the person, find out how they were trained, where their degrees are.
And how they feel to you and try them out.
There's often a tug of war within these fields, especially if there's no organized credentialing process.
And let's say you want to go to a music therapist.
I've spoken to physicians who use music frequently in their healing process, but to go to somebody who thinks they're good at music and using it to help you heal is difficult because there's no formal accreditation process for that as there is, for example, with acupuncture.
True.
There is, however, there's an American Music Therapy Association, which is quite good.
So you want to know, is your practitioner a member of that association?
Have they taken any training through it?
You know, with some of these energy healing techniques, with some of them there are certifications, with others there aren't.
So I think, you know, you have to be careful and you rely on recommendations of friends and people you trust.
And if I could, I want to torture you a little bit about a couple of very common diseases that we've been asked a lot about.
But let's talk about Alzheimer's.
This is an ailment that a lot of folks don't really understand.
As you can explain better than anybody else, a lot of Alzheimer's is actually due to diseases of the circulation of the brain as well.
But let's say they truly have less cognitive function due to aging.
How do you work with those families and those patients?
Well, I think that, you know, you have to recognize that conventional treatment for Alzheimer's is very poor.
I think that, personally, I would put more money on prevention.
And I think we know a lot about preventive strategies for Alzheimer's.
We know that education helps to prevent, probably by increasing neural connectivity in the brain.
So if you've got more connections, a degenerative process is going to take longer to produce effect.
We know that Alzheimer's begins as an inflammation in the brain, so all anti-inflammatory measures are helpful.
An anti-inflammatory diet, taking ibuprofen regularly.
The herb turmeric, the yellow spice in curry and American mustard, looks as if it has a very significant Alzheimer's preventive effect.
The chief ingredient in marijuana, THC, looks to be a more effective anti-Alzheimer's agent than any of the drugs we have now.
Now that may lead to the development of new kinds of pharmaceutical treatments.
So I think that in the preventive area, there's a lot that's worth applying.
Once Alzheimer's disease begins, there is some good evidence that the herb ginkgo, at least in the early stages, slows down the progression of Alzheimer's disease.
But other than that, once the disease is established, I think it's a matter of finding the best kind of care and eventually custodial care.
We just are not able to do much to change that disease process.
Well, there's another recent study looking at one of the most common drug combinations.
So it's actually an antipsychotic drug combination, which hasn't succeeded.
So I just want to echo the fact that we don't have good solutions in the West.
But there's another herb I thought you would have brought up, huperzine.
Do you not buy that data?
This is a derivative of a plant from China that has been looked at, and I have very little personal experience with it.
I only know what I've read.
So I think out in the world of natural products, there are some things out there.
Personally, the one that I'm most excited about, though, is turmeric.
That looks pretty good to me.
And you may know the population of India has the lowest rate of Alzheimer's in the world.
And there are many experts that think this is due to the fact that Indians eat turmeric in almost every meal.
And how would you actually use turmeric?
We don't really have many traditions for using it.
You can buy standardized extracts of whole turmeric in health food stores.
I would recommend that turmeric has very significant Anti-cancer effects and anti-inflammatory effects, so I think it's useful as an addition to the diet.
When I was in Okinawa looking at healthy aging over there, one of the things that I observed was that there was very frequent consumption Of cold, unsweetened turmeric tea.
Bright yellow, very refreshing, especially in hot weather.
And they had instant turmeric tea.
You could just dissolve it in cold water.
I'm working to make that available here through drweil.com.
Oh, it's wonderful.
How about caffeine?
Any benefit there?
There's been some data on caffeine and Parkinson's.
There's also some data on nicotine, of all things.
That nicotine has a protective effect on the central nervous system.
It seems to reduce risks of both Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's, but obviously it is also addictive and toxic.
So pharmaceutical companies are working to try to find analogs of nicotine that might have that beneficial effect without the downside.
And if I could just sort of quick, you've moved into antidepressant.
Depression drugs are some of the most commonly used.
In aggregate, they probably are the most commonly used drugs in this country.
If you can just sort of start into this.
Well, I think clearly antidepressant drugs have their place.
Severe depression is a serious problem and it requires treatment.
However, I think that even when these drugs are used, they should be used for a limited period, say a year, and then you try to find other solutions.
There's more and more information coming out about the toxicity of these drugs, both behavioral toxicity and physical toxicity.
There are other ways of dealing with depression.
First of all, physical exercise is a powerful antidepressant, both preventive and treatment.
Supplementation of the diet with fish oil, sometimes quite high doses, you know, four, five, six or more grams a day, looks to be a very useful way of dealing with depression.
There are a lot of natural antidepressant agents, things like Sammy and St. John's wort, We have lots
more questions to get to.
But first, let's take a quick break. - Andy, we're just finishing up on depression, and you mentioned exercise was good, and you pointed out a few other areas where we have some medicinal benefits, and you pointed out a few other areas where we have some medicinal benefits, but Isn't depression part of life?
I think depression is part of life.
I think we over-diagnose and over-treat.
Also, there has been an interesting observation that there is a link between creativity and depression.
Some of our finest artists, writers, creative people have been plagued by depression and often have said that when they've come out of periods of depression, they've had their greatest creative bursts.
One of the concerns about giving antidepressants out so widely is that we may be damping down creativity.
That's an incredible point.
I notice it because it's so frequently mentioned when creative minds are talking about how they actually created.
But we don't actually think about it as part of that process.
When do you give antidepressants then?
Well, I think when depression is at a point where people can't take care of themselves, lose interest in eating, I mean, that's really serious.
That's often associated with suicide.
That is, I think, a real medical psychiatric emergency and requires intervention, and that may be an appropriate time.
To give pharmaceutical antidepressants.
But as I said, that still may mean that you keep people on them for a limited period and then try other strategies.
So I think when you're dealing with moderate to severe depression, I would certainly consider antidepressants as one option, but I might do other things as well.
But for many of the cases of mild to moderate depression, I would think that antidepressant drugs are a last resort.
You try other things first.
Absolutely.
I applaud what you're saying.
Kudos.
Especially in kids, Mehmet.
You know, one of the great concerns is the amount of psychiatric medication being given to kids these days.
And there's a lot of children who are on multiple psychiatric medications.
Often, I think, where the diagnoses are questionable, or at least we don't really look fully as to why these problems are appearing, and the one solution is to give these drugs.
I can tell America that if I wasn't medicated, your kid probably doesn't need to be either.
My mother used to look so tired all the time.
Why can't you be like all the other little boys?
Any one about detox?
There's a lot spoken about colonics.
I think the body has many wonderful ways of detoxing itself.
For example, through loss of urine, through defecation, through breathing.
One of the most powerful is sweating.
We talked earlier a little bit about steam bathing.
You know, you come from a culture where sweat bathing is very prominent.
I have been to many cultures, Japan, for example, Native American cultures who use sweat bathing for both a religious method of purification but also for health reasons.
I am a great believer in steam bathing.
I have a steam room in my house.
I use it frequently.
I think sweating is one of the most powerful ways of ridding the bodies of toxins, especially if you're drinking enough water while you do it.
And I think the best way to detoxify is to stop putting toxins in the body.
If you stop putting them in, it clears itself out.
I don't think there's any need for doing colonics.
I think the body is perfectly capable of keeping the colon clean as long as you're having regular eliminations.
If you want to do it, that's fine with me, but I don't think there's any medical need for that.
And what do you think about some of these herbs for weight loss?
And what's the future of that whole field?
Most of the pharmaceutical drugs that we give, give about a 7% loss of weight but you've got to take them for the rest of your life.
And you've spoken on this topic and influenced a lot of folks.
Well, you know, I think the only effective product out there for weight loss, whether drugs or herbs, are stimulants.
And stimulants work by both increasing metabolism and suppressing hunger and the hunger center in the brain.
But there's always a downside with these.
They're addictive.
And when you stop using them, you're going to regain all the lost weight.
So I'm afraid there just aren't at the moment any products out there that really work.
And there certainly is nothing, either in the pharmaceutical realm or the herbal realm, that's going to fulfill this fantasy that so many people have of a product that allows you to eat everything you want and lose weight.
That's a great point.
I'm with Andy Weil.
Dr. Weil's at the Program for Integrative Medicine at the College of Medicine, University of Arizona.
He's on the faculty there, and he's really changed the way we think about integrative medicine in America.
Andy, you mentioned olive oil as a main cooking oil.
Do you not use canola oil and other oils that have flashpoints?
I do.
I use canola oil when I want a neutral flavored oil or when I do, you know, if I'm going to heat something to a higher temperature.
But I think olive oil as a general cooking fat is great because it contains an antioxidant fraction.
If you're using extra virgin olive oil, it's got a fraction of polyphenols, which are similar to the antioxidants that are in green tea and dark chocolate, and these appear to be very beneficial for us.
Let's move now from food to another area that you've spent some of your life working in, which is the bigger issues that make it worth living.
I had the honor of hosting the Dalai Lama with Bob Thurman at a longevity conference in New York a few weeks ago.
We'd spoken about it, and he made the big point when we were talking about how to live longer that there needs to be a point to living longer.
Otherwise, in Tibetan culture, he said that may a sinner's life be short.
There's no point building...
Why build up bad karma?
What do you talk, when you've talked to folks about longevity and use in life, and in particular, the issue of prayer comes up for me a lot.
And although prayer might have two levels of benefit, one is just feeling part of humanity has benefits, it releases oxytocin, it may just be the right thing to do.
But there's also the possibility that there are non-local mechanisms by which prayer acts.
I'm not an expert in that area, and the scientific research on it I think is contradictory.
There have been some studies showing that prayer produces beneficial outcomes in People recovering from cardiac surgery, even when the people didn't know that they were being prayed for.
If that can be documented, that certainly challenges a lot of our assumptions in Western science about cause and effect.
If people know that they're being prayed for, then we're on familiar ground, that this is a matter of belief, and we know that belief can activate healing mechanisms in the body.
So I think that's an open question.
I'm open to it, but I would really need to see some good evidence.
Fair enough.
I worked with Mitch Krukoff at Duke University on the mantra trial.
The mantra trial was an effort to look at this question, and we did not, in 750 patients who were randomized to prayer or not prayer, find a difference.
But there were some subgroups actually that had interesting outcomes, and you sort of stuck with the reality that most people in these trials think they're getting prayed for.
In fact, most people probably are getting prayed for by their family.
It's very hard to tease it out.
Andy, let me push to you a little bit about your personal life, because I think a lot of folks are curious about how you've been able to carry on the intense workload you have and the amount of pressure that's placed on you for that reason.
What kind of vitamins do you take?
How much do you walk?
I mean, you advocate walking quite frequently.
Actually, you know, I do, but my main physical activity these days is swimming.
I'm a pretty regular swimmer and that works well for me and this is one of the things I've changed as I've gotten older because there was a period of my life when I ran, I still like to cycle, but I just find that swimming agrees with my body more than other forms of aerobic activity.
I also do walk.
I try to swim every day.
I do some strength training.
I do some yoga.
And then, in addition, I practice some sitting meditation.
I do my breathing exercises.
I'm a good cook.
I grow a lot of my own food.
I like to make healthy food.
I take my own brand, a wild lifestyle brand of multivitamin every day.
What do you take personally?
It's the Wild Lifestyle Daily Pack, which is a multivitamin, multimineral formula.
I take some extra CoQ10 with that.
It's a complete...
Daily multivitamin, multimineral.
It's one that I formulated myself and that I like very much.
You mentioned CoQ10.
By the way, I have lots of folks who trust your daily pack.
It is a very robust and frequently used pack by folks in the know.
I also take a product called Juvenon, which was invented by Dr. Bruce Ames at UC Berkeley.
This is a combination of alpha-lipoic acid and acetyl-L-carnitine.
Which I think is useful both for metabolic syndrome and for preservation of the health of mitochondria, the energy factories in our cells, very useful for the brain as well.
I was interested in Juvenon for a different project we were working on, and there's so much data around mitochondrial disease and aging that makes a ton of sense.
But is that something that most folks preventively you think ought to be taking in particular when they're concerned about...
That's what I would consider.
I would read up on it.
You know, alpha-lipoic acid is a very useful antioxidant.
It's got many good effects.
It helps...
Preserve insulin sensitivity, acetyl-L-carnitine, also very interesting effects on the brain.
So I think both of these have, there's good data behind them and I would consider it.
Perfect.
And you mentioned CoQ10.
The big beef about CoQ10 in my mind is that we consume more CoQ10 than is manufactured.
So there's obviously sources of CoQ10 that really aren't real.
How do folks tell?
Well, you know, I recommend getting an emulsified or soft gel form from a reliable company.
But I think it's very useful.
But when you have world athletes swearing by it, there's so many that do, you begin to think, hey, maybe this makes some sense.
Well, I think there's a lot of data on it.
It's a useful antioxidant.
It has special properties on heart muscle cells and muscle cells in general.
As you know, anyone on a statin drug should be taking supplemental CoQ10 because statins suppresses production of that in the body.
Let's just emphasize that, especially folks that have muscle pain.
The muscle pain you're getting with the statin drugs, for a lot of you, is because the muscles themselves are being starved of the nutrients they need, and coenzyme Q10 can reverse that process.
Right.
Let me talk, finally, and I'll let you go, and it's been so kind to spend the whole hour with us, about what the future of integrative medicine is.
I think it's very bright.
You know, we're going to see the collapse of our healthcare system.
It's already happening.
And I think as that deepens, the wisdom of integrative medicine is going to become more apparent because it offers a promise of bringing lower-cost treatments into the mainstream that preserve or even improve outcomes.
At the program of integrative medicine, our focus is really on developing new models of medical education, new curriculum.
Offering a combined integrative medicine, family medicine residency fellowship.
That's a four-year program that's being piloted at a number of residency programs.
And we're going to expand this.
Our goal is to develop a comprehensive curriculum in integrative medicine that will be a required, accredited part of all residency training and all specialties.
And that's a very realistic goal, and we're moving very fast on it.
Dr. Weil, thank you very much.
You've been kind enough to teach us about things ranging from how to maintain your healthy sinuses by getting rid of some of the toxicities in your diet through the management of high blood pressure, depression, and even hopefully helping us avoid Alzheimer's.
Dr. Weil, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you, Dr. Oz.
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