Andrew Weil likes to tell the story of Oliver, the man who was cured by a bumblebee. There was a time when nobody believed Oliver, but when Weil heard the story, he didn't doubt it for a minute. At the time of his cure, Oliver was 64 years old and had been suffering from rheumatoid arthritis since he was in his 30s. His hands were so swollen that he had given up trying to find gloves to fit them. His shoes were two sizes larger than they used to be and seemed to be growing each year. He took up to a dozen different pain relievers every day, though few actually relieved his pain.
One evening Oliver was putting on a pair of pajamas that had been dried on the backyard line when he felt a sharp pain in his left knee. He slapped at the spot, shook his pajama leg and out tumbled a bee. The next day Oliver's knee was tender, swollen and hot with venom. After another day or two, a curious thing happened: as the pain from the sting subsided, the ache from the arthritis in that knee began to diminish as well. A few weeks later, the swelling in all of Oliver's joints was gone. A short while after that, the chronic body-wide pain vanished too. Oliver is now a limber 86 years old. He hasn't been bothered by arthritis for 22 years.
"There's a long history of studies documenting the benefits of animal venom," Weil says today. "Bee venom in particular contains some very powerful anti-inflammatory compounds. Oliver was the lucky beneficiary of that."
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 until his "cranial motions" were back in synch, allowing his digestive "impulses" to begin to flow again.
To 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 he has to say.