Early years

Andrew Thomas Weil was born in Philadelphia on June 8, 1942,^[8] the only child of parents who operated a millinery store,^[8] in a family that was Reform Jewish.^[9] He graduated from high school in 1959 and was awarded a scholarship from the American Association for the United Nations,^[8] giving him the opportunity to go abroad for a year, living with families in India, Thailand, and Greece.^[10] From this experience he became convinced that in many ways American culture and science was insular and unaware of non-American practices. He began hearing that mescaline enhanced creativity and produced visionary experiences, and finding little information on the subject, he read The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.^{[when?][11]: 24f}

Undergraduate period

Weil entered Harvard University in 1960, majoring in biology with a concentration in ethnobotany.^[8] He had an early curiosity regarding psychoactive drugs, and in that period, met Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, and separately engaged in organized experimentation with mescaline.^[12] Weil wrote for Harvard Crimson.^{[11]: 86 [13]} One published account of the period describes a falling out of Weil from the group that included the faculty—among whom the experimentation with drugs was contentious, and with regard to undergraduates, proscribed;^[14][15] the falling out involved an exposé on drug-use and supply that Weil wrote for the Crimson.^[12] Weil wrote of faculty experimentation with drugs in a series of Crimson pieces:^[16]

• "Better Than a Damn", (February 20, 1962), his apparent first Crimson piece;^[13][17]
• "Alpert Defends Drugs on 'Open End,'" (May 27, 1963);^[18] and
• "Investigation Unlikely in Dismissal of Alpert", (May 29, 1963).^[19]

and that this reporting included the claim that "undergraduates had indeed been able to obtain access to psilocybin from members" of the Harvard faculty research team that was involved in such research.^[16] As late as 1973, Weil's name appears in conjunction with an editorial regarding the 1963 firing of Alpert, which stated the view that it would be "unfortunate if the firing of Richard Alpert led to the suppression of legitimate research into the effects of hallucinogenic compounds", distancing himself and the Crimson from the "shoddiness of their work as scientists ... less [the result] of incompetence than of a conscious rejection of scientific ways of looking at things."^[20]

Weil's undergraduate thesis was titled "The Use of Nutmeg as a Psychotropic Agent",^[12] specifically, on the narcotic properties of nutmeg,^[21] inspired by a class with David McClelland,^{[citation needed]} chair of the Department of Social Relations, and a former director of Harvard's Center for Research in Personality.^[15] In 1964, he graduated cum laude with a B.A. in biology.^[8]

Medical training

Weil entered Harvard Medical School, "not with the intention of becoming a physician but rather simply to obtain a medical education."^[8] He received a medical degree in 1968,^[22][23][24] although "the Harvard faculty ... threatened to withhold it because of a controversial marijuana study Weil had helped conduct" in his final year.^[8] Weil moved to San Francisco and completed a one-year medical internship at Mount Zion Hospital in 1968–69.^[22][23][25] While there, he volunteered at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.^{[citation needed]} Weil went on to complete one year of a two-year program at NIH, resigning due to "official opposition to his work with marijuana".^[25]

Overview

While Weil's early books and publications primarily explored altered states of consciousness,^{[citation needed]} he has since expanded the scope of his work to encompass healthy lifestyles and health care in general.^{[citation needed]} In the last ten years, Weil has focused much of his work on the health concerns of older people.^{[citation needed]} In his book Healthy Aging, Weil looks at the process of growing older from a physical, social, and cross-cultural perspective,^{[citation needed]} and in his book Why our Health Matters is focused on health care reform.^{[citation needed]}

Of his books, several have appeared on various bestseller lists, both as hardbacks and as paperbacks (many appearing so in the 1990s^[39]), some of them being Spontaneous Healing (1995; on the New York Times list),^{[40][better source needed][better source needed]} Eight Weeks to Optimum Health (1997; on the Publishers Weekly and New York Times lists),^{[40][41][better source needed]} Eating Well for Optimum Health (2000; Publishers Weekly, New York Times),^{[40][41][better source needed]} The Healthy Kitchen (2002, with chef Rosie Daley; New York Times),^{[40][better source needed]} Healthy Aging (2005; New York Times),^{[40][better source needed]} and Spontaneous Happiness (2011; New York Times).^{[40][better source needed]}

List of popular works

In addition to the foregoing individual paperback, hardback, audio, and electronic versions, various combined and compendia editions have appeared.^{[citation needed]}

Academic works

As of 2015, Weil was serving as series editor of an academic imprint from Oxford University Press called the Weil Integrative Medicine Library, volumes for clinicians in more than 10 medical specialties, including oncology, cardiology, rheumatology, pediatrics, and psychology.^[42] Weil co-edited the first volume, Integrative Oncology, with Donald Abrams, which appeared in 2009.^[27] Academic and scholarly reviews of the series and individual volumes were lacking as of 2015—in almost all cases, the publisher's "Reviews and Awards" tabs lack society or other published reviews (apart from Doody's).^[43] A cancer society review of the second edition of the series' Integrative Oncology volume, the first volume to have been published, describes the field as "an exciting new discipline" and the book as offering "best-practice methods to prevent cancer and support those affected by it on all levels: body, mind, and spirit" and as being comprehensive, and offering "meticulous, well-written chapters on proven and yet-to-be-proven methods for enhancing cancer care with integrative oncology."^[44]

Other works

Weil was a regular contributor to High Times magazine from 1975 to 1983.^[45] More recently, Weil has written the forewords to a variety of books, including Paul Stamets's Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World^[46] and Lewis Mehl-Madrona's Coyote Medicine.^[47] In the 21st century, Weil has occasionally written articles for Time magazine.^[48]

Medical

Medical professionals in particular have criticized Weil for promoting treatment claims and alternative medicine practices described as unverified or inefficacious, or for otherwise rejecting aspects of evidence-based medicine. Weil's rejection of some aspects of evidence-based medicine and his promotion of alternative medicine practices that are not verifiably efficacious were criticized in a 1998 New Republic piece by Arnold S. Relman, emeritus editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and emeritus professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.^[49] The late Barry Beyerstein of Simon Fraser University, writing in the journal Academic Medicine in 2001, criticized Weil and various aspects of complementary and alternative medicine, asserting that it held a "magical world-view"; he continued, saying,

On advocating emotional criteria for truth over criteria based on empirical data and logic, New Age medical gurus such as Andrew Weil ... have convinced many that "anything goes" ... By denigrating science, these detractors have enlarged the potential following for magical and pseudoscientific health products.^[50]

In 2003, Steven Knope, author of The Body/Mind Connection (2000),^{[full citation needed]} a physician trained at Weill Cornell Medical College, and former Chair of the Department of Medicine in the Tucson, Arizona, Carondelet system, criticized Weil in a televised discussion for what he considered irresponsible advocacy of untested treatments.^[51] Simon Singh, a recognized British science writer, and Edzard Ernst, a former Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter, echoed Beyerstein's criticism in their 2008 book Trick or Treatment, saying that although Weil correctly promotes exercise and smoke-free lifestyles "much of his advice is nonsense."^[52]

Social

Hans Baer of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Arkansas, writing in 2003, has argued that Weil's approach represents a general limitation of the holistic health/New Age movement, in its "tendenc[y] to downplay the role of social, structural, and environmental factors in the etiology of disease" in the United States, and in doing so, represents a failure to "suggest substantive remedies for improving access to health care", generally, for the "millions of people who lack any type of health insurance"; at the same time, Baer notes (with negative connotations) that Weil instead contributes "to a long tradition of entrepreneurialism in the U.S. medical system."^{[22][23]: 20, 29, 119, 130ff}

Ethical

Beginning in 2006, as the result of his commercial ventures, Weil—as David Gumpert has described—has placed himself in the "awkward position of ... having to defend himself against charges of inappropriately exploiting his medical-celebrity status."^[3] Commenting on a cover article in a recent 2006 edition of the Center for Science in the Public Interest's "highly respected" Nutrition Action Healthletter,^[2] Gumpert called attention to:

• a $14 million deal Weil's business enterprise had made with drugstore.com,^[2][3]
• the DrWeil.com personalized service of recommending supplements (purchase of which are made easy via DrWeil.com and drugstore.com),^[2][3]
• long-standing recommendations for supplements appearing despite studies questioning their efficacy,^[2][3] and to
• the clear nature of the pressures on Weil because of the deals, and the clear consanguinity of person and brand.^[3]

The Forbes article noted, in particular, drugstore.com's 2005 lawsuit against DrWeil.com for Weil's having "failed to perform any of his marketing obligations", noting that in a 2004 Larry King Live interview, Weil failed to promote this business partner, despite the program offering "reasonable opportunity for Weil to use efforts to promote drugstore.com."^[3] Moreover, the CSPI's newsletter noted that their investigations into the vitamin and supplement recommendation service led them to conclude that the algorithms behind the recommendations were, by default, set to recommend purchases: regardless of how the online inquiries of the personalized service were answered, "we couldn't get the Advisor to stop recommending that we buy supplements."^[2][3] The CSPI article concludes, "Beware of doctors who sell what they recommend."^[2][3]

In 2006, the Center for Science in the Public Interest also commented on a Time magazine piece by Weil rebutting a recent JAMA report on the failure of fish oil supplements to significantly reduce risk of serious heart arrhythmias,^[53] where he emphasized the benefits of fish oil supplements without a disclaimer that he had a direct commercial interest in the sale of these supplements.^[54]

Another specific criticism has been leveled with regard to the message of his Healthy Aging (2005), which argues that aging should be accepted as a natural stage in life,^{[citation needed]} while these skin care products were being sold at Macy's with the advertising claim of the products' "optimiz[ing] skin's defense against aging"—alongside a large picture of Weil.^[55]

Weil has also been accused by others in the alternative health movement of being involved in the "dishonest practice of spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about competitors' products, while pretending to be [an] objective 3rd [party]."^{[56][better source needed]}

Political

Weil's 1983 Chocolate to Morphine roused the ire of Florida senator Paula Hawkins, "who demanded that the book, a veritable encyclopaedia of various drugs and their effects on humans, be removed from schools and libraries."^[8][57]