A Call to Action: Why Our Health Matters

On the evening of President Obama’s healthcare speech, we stumbled upon this recently posted article by Dr. Andrew Weil.  Originally posted here, we hope it inspires you as it has us in its call to action toward true healthcare reform that starts with a clear understanding of our health and why it matters.

A Call to Action: Why Our Health Matters

As an American, you have a right to good health care that is effective, accessible, and affordable, that serves you from infancy through old age, that allows you to go to practitioners and facilities of your choosing, and that offers a broad range of therapeutic options.

We currently have an expensive system that is not making people well. While there has been tremendous debate over access and payment, there has been less focus on the content of health care. Without a change in that content, we will never have a sustainable system; all attempts at reform will be taken down by unmanageable costs.

As I outlined in my book, Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future, here are some changes we can demand immediately:

1. Ban direct-to-consumer marketing and advertising by big pharma.
Sales of $643 billion a year have made the pharmaceutical industry the number one most profitable business in the country. Most pharmaceutical companies spend a huge portion of their budget on advertising and promotion. The result is a nation of people who believe there’s a pill for every health problem. Big pharma advertising is producing a distorted and narrow view of how health care works, which is why there are several bills moving through Congress that aim to clamp down on it.

2. Create a National Institute of Health and Healing at the NIH and fund it generously
If our health care system is to achieve greatness, our medicine needs to return to its roots. It must focus again on the natural and innate healing power of human beings. This means investing more in research that will help us understand the body’s ability to maintain health, defend itself from harm, regenerate damaged tissue and adapt to injury and loss. Doing so will help us create and improve treatment and therapies that are less invasive and less expensive while making the most of our most powerful healing asset: ourselves.

3. Create an Office of Health Promotion within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and fund it appropriately.
We spend 40 times more on the health risks of terrorism than we do on the health risks of obesity, which kills about 400,000 people a year. There is too much emphasis on treating disease rather than on protecting health in the first place. We need to invest real dollars and ingenuity in educating people about nutrition, exercise and other healthy activities. It’s the single most effective way to defeat the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and conditions that lead to life-threatening diseases.

4. Teach health promotion and integrative medicine at medical schools and residency programs.
We need to create a new generation of hands-on primary care physicians who are as knowledgeable about promoting health practices that their patients can adopt to prevent serious, chronic diseases as they are about disease management and crisis intervention.

5. Require insurers to cover health promotion and integrative care.
Millions of Americans today are taking dietary supplements, practicing yoga and integrating other natural therapies into their lives. These are all preventive measures that will keep them out of the doctor’s office and drive down the costs of treating serious problems like heart disease and diabetes. Yet none of these healthy activities is covered by insurance companies.

6. Establish an Office of Health Education within the U.S. Department of Education.
We need to start healthy habits young. This office would make nutrition, diet, and exercise an integrated part of every child’s education and encourage innovative ways to teach healthy practices to young people so the messages stick.

7. Learn how to take care of yourself!
You can’t afford to get sick, and you can’t depend on the present health care system to keep you well. It’s up to you to protect and maintain your body’s innate capacity for health and healing by making the right choices in how you live.

Yours in health,
Andrew Weil, M.D.

Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future is available now. Visit the website Why Our Health Matters for more information.

Andrew Weil, M.D., is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the editorial director of www.DrWeil.com.

Acupuncture For Sciatica Nerve Pain – The Alternative To Prescription Drugs.

Perhaps your grandmother has mentioned having sciatica. Although it may sound like a foreign food dish, in reality it is a painful bodily condition. Here, I shed light on the mystery.

As a matter of fact, the mystery is not very complex. Sciatica is a condition that affects the body’s sciatic nerve. The sciatic nerve, the largest nerve in the body, begins in the lower spine and extends through the buttocks and lower leg. Sciatic pain may be felt from the lower back all the way to the toes. It occurs when the sciatic nerve becomes inflamed.

Many things can cause sciatica. A problem with the vertebral column is most often the culprit. A bulging disc can cause the nerve to become trapped, resulting in excruciating pain in the lower back, buttocks and lower legs. It is possible for a disc to herniate at the level of the spine where the sciatic nerve begins. As the disc then exerts pressure on the nerve, it becomes trapped. Various symptoms occur as the nerve becomes irritated and inflamed. Other conditions can cause the sciatic nerve to become inflamed, including emotional stressors, infections, injury, etc.

Symptoms occur when the sciatic nerve is caught. Pain is the major symptom. The pain can affect your whole leg. The pain may be present in your lower back, your buttocks or in your thigh, or it could be present in all three areas. Sometimes numbness, tingling or burning occur, too. Sitting can also be a painful experience for people who have sciatica. It seems that the only way to get relief is to lie straight.

At first, the majority of people do not go to their physician, and they are even less likely to visit a Florida acupuncturist. But you should seek medical help when the pain continues. Make sure that you explain all your symptoms to your physician so that he/she can provide a proper diagnosis. In addition, the physician will perform an examination and take a medical history.

Allopathic physicians may advise the use of prescription pain killers and anti-inflammatory medicines; and possibly even surgery. These approaches are unlikely to fix the problem, most often covering up your symptoms. The pain and inflammation can be taken care of with medication, but you don’t want to be on painkillers for the rest of your life, so the misalignment of the spine must be corrected.

For this reason visiting your acupuncturist is highly recommended. Through Traditional Chinese Medicine including acupuncture, cupping, and herbs, the root of the problem is addressed and corrected rather than masked by medications. Once your pain is alleviated a great way to keep the sciatica at bay is to practice yoga regularly. Stretching and strengthening will keep your structure in optimal health, not to mention all the other wonderful benefits you will receive from this ancient wisdom.

Fun with Kombucha!

We had a blast last Saturday at the first Kombucha 101 class, part of the DIY Probiotic series @ FSHL… It was the perfect group for getting our feet with this new class, intimate enough that it felt like a party!

If you missed it, then pencil in October 3 on your calendar for the next FSHL Kombucha class, from 10 a.m. till noon. (Early enuf that you can enjoy the rest of your Saturday!)  We’ll also be at the FSHL Community Open House on Wed. nite, Sept 30th (6:30-8:30), so come on by and try some of ChaCha’s yummy kombucha…

Cinnamon is a fave, perfect for those fall nights that are just around the corner. We’ll have fizzy ginger, of course, as well as cherry, and blueberry/cranberry… Not to mention everybody’s favorite, raspberry rainbow!

Till then, most kombuchaly,

Vicki  <KomBuChaCha@gmail.com>
Orlando, FL

Disease Mongering: Good for Big Pharma, Bad for You

By Dr. Andrew Weil

Original Post published at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/disease-mongering-good-fo_b_275616.html

In “Should You Get Your Drug Information From an Actor?” I discussed the pharmaceutical industry’s egregious practice of using celebrity-driven, prime time television commercials to promote drugs directly to consumers. Illegal in most of the world — and legal in this country only since 1985 — this kind of advertising does much more harm than good and should be banned.

But as bad as this practice is, at least the example that I cited, actor Sally Field’s Boniva campaign, promotes a drug to treat a real disease: osteoporosis. Even worse is a growing trend to invert this process: to promote diseases to fit existing drugs. In a fascinating New York Review of Books piece, Marcia Angell, M.D., denounced the practice of “disease mongering.” As she put it, “The strategy is to convince as many people as possible (along with their doctors, of course) that they have medical conditions that require long-term drug treatment.”

A British Medical Journal article said it more succinctly, “A lot of money can be made from healthy people who believe they are sick.”

A central disease-mongering tactic is to attach polysyllabic, clinical-sounding names to what used to be seen as trivial or transient conditions. In most cases, the new, formidable names come complete with acronyms, which add even more gravitas. Thus:

• Occasional heartburn becomes “gastro-esophageal reflux disease” or GERD.
• Impotence becomes “erectile dysfunction” or ED.
• Premenstrual tension becomes “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” or PMDD.
• Shyness becomes “social anxiety disorder” or SAD.
• Fidgeting legs becomes “restless leg syndrome” or RLS.

Clearly, extreme, intractable versions of these conditions may indeed require vigorous treatment, but the pharmaceutical industry does little to draw a distinction between serious and mild manifestations. Minor gastric upset following a spicy meal is labeled “GERD,” and butterflies before giving a speech is “SAD.” And the proffered solution? “Off-label” use of existing drugs to expand their market share, though there may be little or no research that justifies such use.

So what should be done? The nation is in the throes of a pitched debate about health care reform, and I’m a vigorous advocate for universal health care and many other political changes (as laid out in my book, Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future).

But as we push for a better medical system, we must also remember that not all of the changes we need can be left to politicians. As a culture, we should be suspicious whenever we hear of a new “disease,” and ask whether it may just be a marketing ploy to exploit one of the minor discomforts that come with being a human being — and a driver of the out-of-control costs of American health care.

If it is, the best “medicine” may be low-tech, inexpensive and safe measures such as small modifications in diet or exercise patterns, or some simple stress-reduction techniques. Or — even more radical! — the answer may simply be to wait, give the body’s own healing mechanisms a chance to find equilibrium, and get on with our lives.

Andrew Weil, M.D., is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the editorial director of www.DrWeil.com.

Fear, Greed, and X-Rays

By Dr. Andrew Weil       This article originally published at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/fear-greed-and-x-rays_b_270828.html

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Fear and greed are potent motivators. When both of these forces push in the same direction, virtually no human being can resist. And doctors — despite many expectations to the contrary — are human beings.

This is one reason why medical costs in the U.S. have spiraled out of control, yet we are among the least healthy people in the developed world.

On the fear side, consider this email I got from a physician friend who had read galleys of my book Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future which will be released September 8, 2009:

“You should spend some time with me in our ER, which is totally typical of what is going on all over the U.S. Incredibly expensive, unnecessary, and potentially harmful X-ray scans are ordered with gay abandon on all patients to make sure that ‘nothing is missed’ that a lawyer might later use against the ER. Patients with the most ridiculous complaints are admitted to the CCU [critical care unit] just to make sure that an MI [myocardial infarction, a.k.a. heart attack] is not missed. I would guess that $10,000 dollars per day or more of wasted X-ray radiation studies occur in our ER everyday. Multiply this times 365 and times the thousands of ERs in the country and you come up with billions and billions of dollars of pure waste in our system.”

Along with over-scanning, over-biopsying, over-blood-working and other diagnostic excesses, fear propels over-treatment. Anytime a physician diverges from standard U.S. treatment protocols, nearly all of which skew toward expensive drugs and surgery, lawsuit-fear looms. “Defensive treatment” strips physicians of clinical judgment, costs billions and leaves patients less healthy, but it’s hard to blame physicians who practice it. As one wearily told me, “You never forget your first lawsuit.”

Physicians like to discuss the fear side, because it shifts the blame to lawyers. The greed side, however, deserves just as much scrutiny and reform. Consider “The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care,” a must-read New Yorker article by Atul Gawande, M.D. Gawande visited McAllen, Texas, to discover why per-capita health care expenditures there are the highest in the nation. He found that many physicians in high-medical-cost cities such as McAllen have a diversified “revenue stream,” the result of what one hospital administrator termed “entrepreneurial spirit.” This “spirit” often manifested in physicians owning their own medical testing equipment, which meant the more tests they ordered, the more money they made. A 2002 University of North Carolina study showed doctors who own imaging equipment sent patients for roughly two to eight times more imaging tests than those who don’t own.

In Gawande’s article, a McAllen doctor who refused to hop aboard this gravy train had a more sensible take on the local “spirit.” “Medicine has become a pig trough here,” he said. “We took a wrong turn when doctors stopped being doctors and became businessmen.”

Lest you think the only drawback of over-scanning is wasted billions, note that from 1980 to 2006, per-capita radiation dosage from medical testing more than quintupled. A controversial study published in the November 29, 2007, New England Journal of Medicine estimated that computed tomography (CT) scans — the type of imaging that has grown most explosively — administered today could eventually cause up to 2% of cancer deaths.

As with fear, greed also propels expensive, inappropriate treatment. If a clinic loses money each time it counsels a patient to control type 2 diabetes with diet and exercise, but makes a hefty profit when it amputates a foot riddled with diabetic ulcers, how long will it continue to emphasize the former?

Because these problems have two causes, the solution is twofold.

To quell the fear that drives physicians to over-test and over-treat, we need vigorous legal reform to cap malpractice payouts. Staunching the greed motive requires a more dramatic change. Since a single CT scanner can bring in $400,000 a year in profit, it’s vital to sever the link between ordering tests and making money. Restricting ownership of testing equipment to nonprofit, government, or independent private entities is crucial.

As for popularizing less lucrative — but often better — low-tech treatments, putting physicians on salary can also help. Whether the paycheck comes from a nonprofit organization such as the Mayo Clinic or some variety of single-payer national health care, stabilized incomes would let physicians more readily focus on the health of their patients rather than on their own finances.

Until both of these corrective measures are in place nationwide, it’s up to you to ask your physician if the tests or treatments ordered for you are truly essential. You might get an honest answer about the test’s potential risks and benefits. Then, together, you can arrive at a decision that satisfies both of you.

Andrew Weil, M.D., is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the editorial director of www.DrWeil.com.

The Question No One Asks About Healthcare

This article originally published at:
By Dr. Andrew Weil

The query gripping the nation: “How do we reform health care?”

But I don’t hear anyone asking a far more essential question: “What is health?”

Given that we all want health and spend trillions to “care” for it, it’s sobering how little thought we give to its true meaning. When I ask, the response I receive is typically “the absence of disease.” Health is much more interesting and consequential than this. To define it in this negative sense is no more accurate than to define wealth as the absence of poverty.

I define health as a positive state of wholeness and balance in which an organism functions efficiently and interacts smoothly with its environment. Good health comes from an innate resilience that allows you to move through life without suffering harm from toxins, germs, allergens and changing environmental and dietary conditions.

By no stretch of the imagination does mainstream American “health care” move us closer to this vision of robust, resilient health. It is a fiscally unsustainable, technology-centric, symptom-focused disease-management system. Consider that two-thirds of all Americans die from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes, which are all strongly associated with lifestyle choices. Maintaining and paying for our current system will serve only to continue – if not exacerbate – this trend, and bankrupt the nation in the process.

A truly reformed health care system will care for our health rather than care for our ills. This does not mean it will abandon those who are sick or injured. Instead, measures that maximize our innate self-healing capacity – our health – will be used first whenever possible to both facilitate recovery and keep us whole and balanced.

How do we get there? Here is a summary of the health-promoting, disease-preventing agenda that I set forth in my new book, Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future available September 8, 2009.

• Our medical schools must teach health promotion along with disease management and crisis intervention. If the National Board of Medical Examiners included questions on these subjects in required student exams, schools would quickly add them to their curricula.
• Insurance companies, whether private or government owned, must be compelled to pay for health-promoting measures. In turn, this will encourage physicians to offer such treatments in earnest.
• The federal government must create new departments within the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services to emphasize health promotion and disease prevention. An Office of Health Education should be set up within the Department of Education to establish a K-12 curriculum of health, healing and disease prevention.
• Citizens must pressure the American Hospital Association, the American Public Health Association, the Centers for Disease Control and other relevant governmental agencies to make greening our hospitals and medical centers a top priority so that they themselves don’t create even more illness. Examples of such changes: stopping environmental pollution caused by hospitals (e.g. mercury discharge) and banning the sale of junk food on their premises.
• We need to accept the seemingly obvious fact that a toxic environment can make people sick and that no amount of medical intervention can protect us. The health care community must become a powerful political lobby for environmental policy and legislation.
• We need to support grassroots movements to ban sales of soft drinks and junk foods in public schools, make schools serious about physical education and health education, and fight attempts by agribusiness to weaken federal organic standards.
• We must insist (with the power of our pocketbooks, voices and written words) that television networks, movie studios, radio, the internet and print use their tremendous influence in a positive way. The media showers us with destructive, illness-promoting messages (such as kids devouring junk food and adults popping pills for trivial, transient discomforts) and fear-based news reporting on health. We must use creative messages in the media to counteract this influence.
• American businesses are struggling to pay outrageous, exploitive insurance bills for their employees, hampering our ability to compete globally. In 2005, General Motors paid an estimated $1,525 in health-care costs for each car it made; Japan’s Honda paid $97ⁱ. We must convince corporate America that preventable employee absenteeism and diminished productivity can be counteracted in a cost-effective way by offering workers health-promoting programs such as discounted gym memberships, smoking cessation programs, and more nutritious cafeteria food. Ultimately, the sophisticated American marketing talent that pushed us toward unhealthy behaviors might be marshaled to move us all in directions that are more consistent with good health.

Benjamin Franklin’s adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” has never been more relevant. In Franklin’s time, contagious disease was the scourge of humankind, but focused effort has rendered it a historic footnote. With sufficient will, we can do the same with chronic disease that now costs us so much to manage.

References:

ⁱRelman, Arnold S., M.D. A Second Opinion: Rescuing America’s Health Care. Public Affairs, 2007, p. 78

Andrew Weil, M.D., is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the editorial director of www.DrWeil.com.

Should You Get Your Drug Information From An Actor?

Sally Field is a talented actor. But what qualifies her to promote Boniva, an osteoporosis drug that is of limited benefit, has worrisome side effects, and for which there are natural alternatives that merit careful consideration?

In “What’s Wrong with American Medicine?” I point out that many high-technology treatments have a shadow side. In most areas of life, technological development has made services better and cheaper, but (with a few notable exceptions) it has made health care worse and more expensive. The result: an unhealthy populace and an economy that’s lurching toward disaster.

A major component of today’s high-tech medical treatment is the reckless overuse of pharmaceutical drugs. An estimated 50 percent of Americans take at least one prescribed medication every day; in 2007, drug sales accounted for an astonishing $315 billion in revenue. When I was growing up, far fewer Americans took prescription drugs.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical marketing, such as Ms. Field’s Boniva campaign, is a major engine behind this unfortunate change. American television, radio, internet and print are saturated with ads for every imaginable drug, typically ending with an entreaty to “ask your doctor.” In 2004, American drug companies spent 24.4% of their sales revenue on promotion, versus just 13.4% for research and development.

Americans now accept these ads as a matter of course, but in my experience, visitors from other countries find them both amusing and appalling. As well they should: the United States and New Zealand are the only two developed countries that allow DTC advertising.

If this anomalous American phenomenon didn’t work, it would indeed be merely amusing. Unfortunately, when you “ask your doctor,” about a given drug, he or she is likely to hand over a prescription. In 2000, every $1 pharmaceutical companies spent on DTC advertising yielded an additional $4.20 in sales. This bewildering return on investment makes it easy to see why a quarter of drug company revenue is spent on advertising.

I worry about DTC ads for three reasons:

1. Drug ads strengthen our belief in pharmaceutical drugs as the cures for all of our problems. In fact, the consequences of poor lifestyle choices cannot be undone with pills.

2. Many advertised drugs are not only ineffective, but have serious side effects that are frequently played down (and occasionally concealed) by manufacturers. Because heavily advertised drugs have such vast profit potential, political and financial interests collude to speed them to market before they have received sufficient scientific scrutiny.

3. Ads circumvent better sources of information and make people believe that they are being proactive about their health when they request an advertised drug. Thirty-second TV spots that trade on emotion and celebrity contribute little or nothing of value to patient education.

The free market works well in many ways, but it has failed us here. Whether it is done independently or as part of an omnibus health care reform initiative, we need to make the same decision that the rest of the developed world has made: that is, ban direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription pharmaceutical products.

Andrew Weil, M.D., is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the editorial director of www.DrWeil.com.

What’s Wrong with American Medicine

This article originally published at

By Dr. Andrew Weil

The latest development appears to be that government-run health insurance programs are, if not off the table, at least sliding toward the edge. Meanwhile, town hall debates rage, Washington lobbyists (outnumbering senators and congressmen by an astounding six to one) hector Congress and the signal-to-noise ratio in the health-care debate steadily deteriorates.

In this shifting and parlous fray, we must carefully delineate the problems that we are trying to fix. Only once this is done should we try to fix them.

I gave my general take on what’s amiss in “The Wrong Diagnosis.” Now, it’s time for more specifics. Here’s my assessment of the three main negative trends in American medicine. I discuss each in detail, and propose solutions, in my next book, Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine that can Transform Our Future, which will be published September 8th, 2009.

Trend #1: Deterioration of Medical Philosophy and Practice
Technology has a shadow side. It accounts for real progress in medicine, but has also hurt it in many ways, making it more impersonal, expensive and dangerous. The false belief that a safety net of sophisticated drugs and machines stretches below us, permitting risky or lazy lifestyle choices, has undermined our spirit of self-reliance. The cold fact is that while Americans live more than 30 years longer than they did at the turn of the last century, public health measures such as better sanitation, immunizations, better food and water, and safer and less polluted workplaces account for 25 years of that increase; medical intervention, only five years. A recent study showed that in the 1990s, only about one in 16,000 Americans had his or her life saved or significantly extended by improvements in health-care technology. “Let’s Take the Stomachache Out of Health Care Reform” provides a real-world example of a different approach.

Trend #2: Failure to Provide Health Care for All
Virtually every other developed country has a national health care program. They are not perfect and never will be, but they generally work better than ours. Studies in places such as Germany, France, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and Canada show that citizens in those countries are happier with their systems than we are, and are healthier as well, with lower rates of obesity and chronic disease. I fully support a national health care program for the U.S.

Trend #3: The Growing Influence of Money
This is the darkest cloud over American medicine. The profit motive, once only a part of health care, now drives the whole system. If current trends hold, a family of four will spend about $64,000 annually for health care in the next seven to nine years (except that they obviously can’t and won’t – so the system, without reform, will collapse before then).

Virtually all of the incentives run in the wrong direction – that is, toward high-tech interventions to make money rather than toward modest, simple protocols that (in at least 80 percent of cases) make or preserve health. Yet there are pockets of efficiency and effectiveness in America. The nonprofit Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is among the highest quality and lowest cost health-care systems in the country, largely because its salaried doctors have no incentive to drive up costs by over-testing and over-treating. Similarly, at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, we train health care professionals to use only the appropriate level of technology for the condition at hand.

In coming blog posts, I’ll propose some detailed solutions to each of these problems. In the meantime, I urge you to read the New Yorker article “The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care” by Atul Gawande, M.D. It’s an extraordinarily clear-eyed assessment of how and why American medicine has lost its way, and how it might return to its healing roots.

Andrew Weil, M.D., is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the editorial director of www.DrWeil.com.

Why Dr. Weil is a Conversative on Health Care

This article originally published at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/why-i-am-a-conservative-o_b_259869.html.  By Dr. Andrew Weil

I appeared on Larry King Live Wednesday night to discuss health care reform with a panel of respected, high-profile physicians. I sounded the themes I wrote about in The Wrong Diagnosis: that Americans must change the content of health care, not just access to it, or we’ll remain among the unhealthiest people in the developed world, and the costs will sink us.

Bill Frist, a physician and former Senate Republican majority leader from Tennessee, responded with what has become the conservative line: that “we do have the best health care” and what Americans principally need is “insurance reform” rather than improved health care practices. Later in the program were video clips of what host Wolf Blitzer termed “conservatives” disrupting town hall meetings on health care reform. Clearly, the prospect of change in health care is highly emotional and disturbs many people.

But here’s my question: Since when is it conservative to embrace new, overpriced, corrupt systems, like the health-destroying and ruinously expensive protocols of much of modern medicine? “Conservative” has several meanings, but two central ones are “favoring traditional views and values,” and “avoiding excess.”

I hold that nothing could be more wild, unconstrained, and downright liberal than the path medicine has taken in just the last 20 years — an unprecedented bacchanalia of excess and contempt for traditional American values.

Pharmaceuticals, once just one of many therapeutic modalities, are now synonymous with medical care; more than half of all insured Americans are taking prescription medicines for chronic health problems. Medical journals, formerly bastions of objectivity, are today often ghostwritten shills for moneyed interests. And physicians, once free to make healing their only goal, must now obey the dictates of lawyers and stockholders by ordering endless tests and dangerous, dubious surgeries for even minor conditions.

While billions of dollars are shunted into very few pockets via such abuses, insurance premiums skyrocket, leaving 47 million Americans with no coverage. The result of medicine’s libertine spree? The relief agency Remote Area Medical, established to bring health care to rural parts of third-world nations, now sends 60 percent of its missions to U.S. cities such as Los Angeles, California and Knoxville, Tennessee.

By contrast, integrative medicine (IM), the system we teach at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson (and that is taught at more than 40 other medical schools nationwide including Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic) is profoundly conservative in at least three ways:

1. It is philosophically conservative in that it aims to restore core values of medicine that were strong in the past, such as a reverence for the healing power of nature and the importance of the therapist-patient relationship.

2. It is medically conservative in stressing prevention and advocating lesser rather than greater intervention — the least invasive, least harmful, least expensive treatments that the circumstances of illness demand. IM practitioners always observe the Hippocratic precept of “First, do no harm,” relying in simpler interventions whenever possible and turning to more drastic ones only when the former fail to produce desired outcomes.

3. It is fiscally conservative in its willingness to look beyond the blinders of high-tech medicine to identify inexpensive therapies that may be useful and in its insistence that they be held to the same standard for clinical- and cost-effectiveness in well-designed outcomes trials.

I urge Senator Frist and all Americans to join me and thousands of physicians and patients in demanding a return to sensible, sustainable, conservative values in medicine. The liberals have had their day.

Andrew Weil, M.D., is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the editorial director of www.DrWeil.com.

Let’s Take the Stomachache Out Of Healthcare

This article originally posted at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/lets-take-the-stomachache_b_257434.html.  By Dr. Andrew Weil