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Even without the new books, it's likely to get tougher still. This summer Weil and the University of Arizona medical school will launch a fellowship program designed to train M.D.s in various protocols of alternative medicine, or, as Weil prefers to call the eclectic healing he practices, "integrative medicine." In addition to classroom training and research work, physicians admitted to the program will get extensive hands-on experience with patients, working alongside Weil at a new integrative-medicine clinic the university has established. Even before the program had begun, Weil was developing plans to market the curriculum to other medical schools looking to develop similar fellowships of their own.
"Ultimately," he says, "we'd like to set up an American College of Integrative Medicine that will establish residency training, set standards, administer exams and do all the other things that lead to accreditation."
Whether conventional medicine will ever extend such diplomatic recognition to breakaway practitioners like Weil is an open question. Part of the problem appears to be Weil himself. Even after 30 years, many of his mainstream colleagues still remember him mostly for his marijuana studies and persist in seeing him, at best, as a drug apologist and, at worst, as an advocate. Weil hasn't always helped his own cause: his third book, From Chocolate to Morphine (Houghton Mifflin, 1983), seemed to argue for the essential blamelessness of most mind-altering drugs and to make little distinction between plants like cocoa and plants like coca--at least in terms of their potential for abuse. Since his recent fame, Weil appears to have become a bit less public with beliefs like this; in promo spots for Weil's pbs specials, the word morphine on the book's dust jacket is conveniently obscured. In private, however, Weil continues to sound defiant. "My views about illicit drugs haven't changed," he says. "There are no good or bad drugs, just good or bad uses."
What disturbs Establishment doctors more about Weil, however, is his medicine. When you look behind all the miracle testimonials in Weil's books, they insist, the science that supports them--whether it's the science of homeopathy, osteopathy or ordinary herbs--looks just plain shabby. "Weil cites a lot of anecdotes," says Dr. James R. Allen, a vice president of the American Medical Association, "and while they can be instructive, that doesn't mean they are necessarily valid in terms of scientific proof."
The rub for Allen and others, however, is that--if the testimonials in Weil's books are to be believed--many people who try these treatments do get better. A mainstream gynecologist may not be able to explain why raspberry and nettles could help cure endometriosis, and a traditional neurologist may be stumped at how breathing exercises could dramatically relieve the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. But the fact remains that in a number of cases these treatments appear to work. For many in mainstream medicine, of course, such a cause-and-effect disconnect sounds like nothing more than an elaborate placebo effect, a sort of self-fulfilling medical prophecy, in which the mere act of having faith in a cure actually leads to one. If alternative treatments are indeed based on such self-healing, that's O.K. with Weil.