Spontaneous Healing : How to Discover and Embrace Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself Mass Market Paperback – April 4, 2000
by Andrew Weil (Author)
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Editorial Reviews
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"DR. ANDREW WEIL IS AN EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENON."
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"MEMORABLE . . . DR. WEIL MAKES HIS CASE CAREFULLY AND CLEARLY."
--The New York Times Book Review
"HIGHLY RECOMMENDED."
--Library Journal (starred review)
From the Inside Flap
The body can heal itself. Spontaneous healing is not a miracle but a fact of biology--the result of the natural healing system that each one of us is born with. Drawing on fascinating case histories as well as medical techniques from around the world, Dr. Andrew Weil shows how spontaneous healing has worked to resolve life-threatening diseases, severe trauma, and chronic pain. Weil then outlines an eight-week program in which you'll discover:
- The truth about spontaneous healing and how it interacts with the mind
- The foods, vitamins, supplements, and tonic herbs that will help you enhance your innate healing powers
- Advice on how to avoid environmental toxins and reduce stress
- The strengths and weaknesses of conventional and alternative treatments
- Natural methods to ameliorate common kinds of illnesses
And much more!
From the Back Cover
The body can heal itself. Spontaneous healing is not a miracle but a fact of biology -- the result of the natural healing system that each one of us is born with. Drawing on fascinating case histories as well as medical techniques from around the world, Dr. Andrew Weil shows how spontaneous healing has resolved life-threatening diseases, severe trauma, and chronic pain. Weil then outlines an eight-week program in which you'll discover:
-- The truth about spontaneous healing and how it interacts with the mind
-- The foods, vitamins, supplements, and tonic herbs that will help you enhance your innate healing powers
-- Advice on how to avoid environmental toxins and reduce stress
-- The strengths and weaknesses of conventional and alternative treatments
-- Natural methods to ameliorate common kinds of illnesses
And much more!
About the Author
Dr. Andrew Weil is a leader in the new field of integrative medicine, which combines the best ideas and practices of Western and alternative medicine. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he is director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona and founder of the Center for Integrative Medicine in Tucson, which is advancing the field worldwide. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller 8 Weeks to Optimum Health. His Web site, "Ask Dr. Weil," is in the top five of all health-related programs on the Internet.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
PROLOGUE IN THE RAIN FOREST
LET ME TAKE YOU with me to a faraway place I visited more than twenty years ago: the sandy bank of a wide river on a sultry afternoon in 1972. The river was a tributary of the Río Caquetá in the northwest Amazon, near the common border of Colombia and Ecuador, and I was lost. I was searching for a shaman, a Kofán Indian named Pedro, who lived in a remote hut somewhere in the huge, dense forest, but the trail that was supposed to take me there left me at an uncrossable river with no sign of how to proceed. It was getting late in the day.
Two days before, after a long, hard drive, I left my Land-Rover at the end of a dirt road and took a motorboat to a tiny frontier settlement, where I spent a restless night. The next day, I found some Indians who took me by canoe to the beginning of a trail they said would eventually bring me to the clearing where Pedro lived. “Half a day’s walk,” they told me, but I knew that half a day’s walk for an Indian might be more for me. I had a backpack with essentials, but not much food, since I expected to be staying with the shaman. After several hours in dark forest, the trail forked. No one had said anything about a fork. I listened for the whisper of intuition and decided to go to the right. After another hour I came upon a clearing with several huts and five Kofán men painting each other’s faces.
I was terribly hot and thirsty and asked in Spanish for water. The men ignored me. I asked again. They said they had no water. “No water?!” I exclaimed. “How can that be?” They shrugged and continued to apply their makeup. I asked for the shaman. “Not here,” said one of the Indians. “Where can I find him?” There was an offhanded indication of a trail beyond the huts. “Is it far?” I asked. Another shrug.
This was a new experience for me. In the hinterlands of Colombia I had always found Indians to be exceedingly hospitable. It was the inhabitants of the rough frontier towns, the mestizo fortune hunters, who were unfriendly and intimidating. Once I passed through them to Indian territory, I always felt safe, assured that the native people would take in a stranger, help him find his destination, and certainly give water to a thirsty traveler.
The five Kofán men were young, handsome, and, obviously, vain. They wore simple cotton tunics, had long, glossy, black hair, and were intently devoted to their cosmetic art. After one would apply new markings to forehead or cheek, the recipient would spend long minutes evaluating the additions in a broken piece of mirrored glass, grunting approval or requesting further embellishment. This was clearly going to take all afternoon. My presence held not the slightest interest for them, and after half an hour of being ignored, I put on my pack and continued down the trail, until, several hours later, it disappeared in a dense thicket at the edge of the big river, leaving me stranded.
It was strikingly beautiful there, although I was inclined to view the river and forest more as obstacles than as sources of sensory pleasure. Big, billowy cumulus clouds floated above the canopy of trees. The river was swift and clear. There was not a sign of human presence, no sounds except those of insects and birds. Were it not for the sandflies, small biting pests that are out in great numbers from dawn to dusk, I would not have minded camping there. I had a hammock and mosquito net in my pack and could have spent the night if necessary, but I felt anxious at the prospect of being lost, and discouraged by the fruitlessness of my quest.
This shaman, so difficult to reach, was said to be a powerful healer. In a year I spent wandering in South America, most of the shamans I met were disappointing. Some were drunks. Some were clearly out for fame and fortune. One, when he learned I was a doctor from Harvard, was interested only in persuading me to obtain for him a certificate from that institution testifying to his powers so that he could one-up his rivals. I had plenty of adventures during these travels, but in the end, none of them had taught me how to be a better doctor. Pedro was my last hope. He was unknown to the outside world. I would be the first gringo to visit him, and I had high hopes that he would teach me the secrets of healing I had so long been searching for.
But now I was lost, and the brilliant Amazon sun was taking on the rich golden tones of the end of afternoon. Night would come quickly here, meaning surprising chilliness along the river and no chance of reaching a habitation. I’m not a smoker, but I lit up three cigarettes at once, Pielrojas (“Redskins”), the local cheap brand, with a picture of a North American Indian on the pack. I puffed on them and blew smoke all around me, hoping for the usual temporary relief tobacco smoke brings from biting sandflies.
When in doubt, eat. I broke into my meager stores and found a packet of cocoa mix and some dried fruit. I set up a little butane stove, boiled some river water, and soon was sipping the hot liquid, which never tasted better—a bit of comfort and familiarity in this, for me, strange environment.
I was in this remote part of South America because I was searching for something I believed to be exotic and extraordinary, something worlds away from my ordinary experience. I was looking for insight into the source of healing power, and the interconnectedness of magic, religion, and medicine. I wanted to understand how the mind interacts with the body. Above all, I hoped to learn practical secrets of helping people to get well. I had spent eight years in a prestigious institution of higher learning, four studying botany and four studying medicine, but I had found no clear answers to my questions. My botanical studies awakened a desire to see the rain forest, meet native practitioners, and help rescue fast-disappearing knowledge of medicinal plants. My medical training made me want to flee from the world of invasive, technological treatment toward a romantic ideal of natural healing.
Three years before, in 1969, when I finished my basic clinical training, I made a conscious decision not to practice the kind of medicine I had just learned. I did so for two reasons, one emotional and one logical. The first was simply a gut feeling that if I were sick, I would not want to be treated the way I had been taught to treat others, unless there were no alternative. That made me uncomfortable about treating others. The logical reason was that most of the treatments I had learned in four years at Harvard Medical School and one of internship did not get to the root of disease processes and promote healing but rather suppressed those processes or merely counteracted the visible symptoms of disease. I had learned almost nothing about health and its maintenance, about how to prevent illness—a great omission, because I have always believed that the primary function of doctors should be to teach people how not to get sick in the first place. The word “doctor” comes from the Latin word for “teacher.” Teaching prevention should be primary; treatment of existing disease, secondary.
I am uneasy about the suppressive nature of conventional medicine. If you look at the names of the most popular categories of drugs in use today, you will find that most of them begin with the prefix “anti.” We use antispasmodics and antihypertensives, antianxiety agents and antidepressants, antihistamines, antiarrhythmics, antitussives, antipyretics, and anti-inflammatories, as well as beta blockers and H2-receptor antagonists. This is truly antimedicine—medicine that is, in essence, counteractive and suppressive.
What is wrong with that? you may ask. If a fever is in the danger zone, or an allergic reaction is out of control, of course those symptoms should be counteracted. I have no objection to use of these treatments on a short-term basis for the management of very severe conditions. But I came to realize, early in my hospital days, that if you rely on such measures as the main strategy for treating illness, you create two kinds of problems. First, you expose patients to risk, because, by their nature, pharmaceutical weapons are strong and toxic. Their desired effects are too often offset by side effects, by toxicity. Adverse reactions to the counteractive drugs of conventional medicine are a great black mark against the system, and I saw more than enough of them in my clinical training to know that there has to be a better way. Botanical medicine appealed to me because it offered the possibility of finding safe, natural alternatives to the drugs I had been taught to use.
The second problem, less visible but more worrisome, is the chance that over time suppressive treatments may actually strengthen disease processes instead of resolving them. This possibility did not occur to me until I read the writings of a great medical heretic, Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843), the German prodigy and renegade physician who developed homeopathy, one of the major schools of alternative medicine. Homeopathy relies on very small doses of highly diluted remedies to catalyze healing responses. I am not a homeopath. I disagree strongly with the many homeopaths who oppose immunization and find the whole system puzzling as well as incompatible with current scientific models of physics and chemistry. Nonetheless, I have experienced and observed homeopathic cures and admire the system for its use of treatments that cannot harm. What is more, I find some of Hahnemann’s ideas useful.
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Product details
ASIN : 0804117942
Publisher : Ballantine Books (April 4, 2000)
Language : English
Mass Market Paperback : 384 pages
Andrew Weil, MD
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Biography
Andrew Weil, M.D., is a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, a healing oriented approach to health care which encompasses body, mind, and spirit. His forthcoming book, "Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better – and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own," will be released on April 25th, 2017.
Combining a Harvard education and a lifetime of practicing natural and preventive medicine, Dr. Weil is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, where he is also a Clinical Professor of Medicine and Professor of Public Health and the Lovell-Jones Professor of Integrative Rheumatology. Dr. Weil received both his medical degree and his undergraduate AB degree in biology (botany) from Harvard University.
Dr. Weil is an internationally-recognized expert for his views on leading a healthy lifestyle, his philosophy of healthy aging, and his critique of the future of medicine and health care. Approximately 10 million copies of Dr. Weil's books have been sold, including "Spontaneous Healing," "8 Weeks to Optimum Health," "Eating Well for Optimum Health," "The Healthy Kitchen," "Healthy Aging," and "Why Our Health Matters."
Online, he is the editorial director of www.drweil.com, the leading web resource for healthy living based on the philosophy of integrative medicine. He can be found on Facebook (facebook.com/drweil), Twitter (twitter.com/drweil), Instagram (instagram.com/drweil) and Pinterest (pinterest.com/drweil).
See a comprehensive list of Dr. Weil's information: about.me/DrWeil
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Customer reviews
4.6 out of 5 stars
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Still Here
5.0 out of 5 stars Don't let the 2nd half undermine the 1st half!
Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2015
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This book was incredibly inspiring and encouraging on my path to recovery from chronic pain.
It's worthy of 5 stars and I agree with 99% of what Dr. Weil says. I will offer one recommendation for reading this book: Don't let the 2nd half undermine what he says in the 1st half. The 2nd half gets very detailed about diet and herbs, and while I believe most of it has merit (I'm not so sure about the electromagnetic paranoia), the 1st half of this book is equally if not more important! I emphasize this because it's so easy for a reader to finish the book and say, "Ok, I need to do this, this, and this with my diet", all the while continuing on with a high-stress lifestyle and manner of thinking. Pay close attention to the stories of spontaneous healing in the first half, because it's always the change of THINKING and belief that catalyzed the patient's drastic recovery, and the diet part is supplemental.
I also highly recommend Dr. Sarno's book The Mindbody Prescription. I am currently reading The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living by Dr. Sood which is endorsed by Dr. Weil and has some merit as well.
67 people found this helpful
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Judith A. Carlson
5.0 out of 5 stars It's a great teaching source.
Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2015
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Some of the nutritional advice is a little bit outdated since the book was first published in 1995 but otherwise is just as I remembered it. I had loaned mine to a friend who subsequently moved without returning it. The techniques Dr.Weil advocates are not difficult and help the body to heal itself. However, nothing happens overnight so don't expect a magic sure. What I've always loved about Dr. Weil is that he uses a common sense approach and isn't adamant about not resorting to allopathic medicine - sometimes you just need an antibiotic, for instance! Anyway, if you want to take charge of your own health and be more comfortable despite any medical/psychological problems you are dealing with, this book is a great source for teaching you how to do that.
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Faux-Creations
5.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly good reading!
Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2016
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An excellent resource for the medical profession in dealing with the human body's ability to heal quickly when the right protocol is observed. Sickness cannot be dealt with by treating the symptoms but rather from a holistic viewpoint covering body, soul and spirit. Many sicknesses today come from unresolved emotions and once the emotion is dealt with, the recovery is sometimes almost spontaneous. Good reading.
11 people found this helpful
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ashier bourne
5.0 out of 5 stars IF you are into healing naturally, this book is ...
Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2017
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IF you are into healing naturally, this book is for you, it tells you about Andrew Weil's Journey to find the way to natural healing and where to go and get this healing and he talks about touring the Big Pharmacy and that 's why he change his mind About being an MD, instead he now teaches at the
city of Tuson, Arizona.
8 people found this helpful
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Jon
5.0 out of 5 stars Very Comprehensible with examples and Almost unbelievable stories.
Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2020
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This was a perfect well thought out book from front to back. The author did not Discredit modern medicine the highlighted it’s a weakness and provided alternatives. I do believe everyone should read this at least once. Everything was explained very easily for the reader and shared many of powerful stories of people overcoming illness when all hope in the medicine field was lost.
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T. Faranda
4.0 out of 5 stars A reasoned resource on a subject fraught with difficulty
Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2007
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FULL DISCLOSURE - I have lymphoma and have been a patient of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for over three years, including a five month chemotherapy regimen.
Besides being the author of this book, which is sub-titled "How to Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself", who is Andrew Weil?
Well, he's a Harvard graduate (Botany) and Harvard medical school graduate, did an internship and then basically dropped out of the standard or orthodox medical field. Spent the next twenty years or so traipsing around the world talking with various shamans, Chinese herbalists, gurus, etc.
And he's gotten to be a very influential guy.
He has been a big proponent of natural therapies for the healing of maladies. While not opposed to allopathic or conventional medicine, Weil heavily criticizes the establishment for emphasizing "disease and it's treatment, rather than health and it's maintenance" (P. 65). He emphasizes natural healing and a variety of alternative therapies. In Weil's view, the body heals itself, it is a "healing system." And the healing system is a functional system, "not an assemblage of structures that can be neatly diagrammed" (P. 65).
Of course this is a point that has been noted by many people, and is obvious to anyone who thinks about it. If you get a cut, the cut heals itself. My son's currently broken ankle will mend itself; he has a cast on simply to protect the ankle from further damage. The cast doesn't heal the break. And the overwhelming opinion is that most cancers heal themselves; our immune system is constantly destroying abnormal cells before they get to any size or we know they are there.
Weil makes a point (P. 110) that "Treatment originates outside you. Healing comes from within."
The book is 280 pages long and divided into three parts. The first section is entitled "The Healing System" and is filled with stories and cases of people who were healed by alternative therapies. Herbs, acupuncture, aromatherapy, certain forms of classic osteopathic medicine, visualization, mind-body interactions, stuff like that.
The second and third sections are entitled "Optimizing the Healing System" - what to do to maintain good health - and "If you get sick". Weil lays out a variety of programs of preventive care. Much of it pretty basic like don't smoke and go for relaxing walks. And then stuff like using tonics and vitamins. The last section is a bit encyclopedic with short sections on various alternative approaches - Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Ayurvedic medicine, imagery and visualization therapy, chiropractic, on and on.
What about cancer? Weil points to the three standard therapies, surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, with strong reservations on the latter two. Too much of a bludgeon approach, with chemotherapy especially having possible deleterious effects on other body systems. He suggests that the ultimate "cure" for cancer will come when we figure out how to "turn on" the immune system to attack and destroy the cancer cells, which somehow escaped or inoculated themselves from the body's immune system. As mentioned above, the standard opinion now is that most cancers develop due to an immune system failure. I think his opinion on the ultimate cancer cure is pretty much the standard opinion in the conventional medical establishment.
Of course the whole problem with Weil's approaches - diet, herbs, aromatherapy, "healing touch", is that there is scarcely any real scientific evidence for the efficacy of any of these approaches. It's all anecdotal. Where are the double blind studies, the comparisons between groups - all the studies that can lend credence to the anecdotes?
Weil admits there aren't many studies, and urges the studies be done. And as one of my physicians said to me, "There are no scientific studies. On the other hand, 2,000 years of Traditional Chinese Medicine has to have something to it."
As you can imagine, Weil has some really strident critics in the medical fraternity. No sense going there in this review.
What do I think? Well, Weil is not just another New Age Wacko. Not that I'll be trading my Sloan Kettering doctors for aromatherapy any time soon. BUT I have started taking an immune system support capsule that Weil recommends (I figure it can't hurt - got it at Shoprite) as well as taking glucosamine chondroitin three times a day for my joints, rather then just the occasional pill.
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37 people found this helpful
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Dottie Parish
5.0 out of 5 stars A Book to Read Over and Over
Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2013
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The thesis of the book is that the medical profession only concerns itself with disease. Medical schools teach nothing about prevention or about the ability for the body to heal itself. It's not against medical care but tells many ways we can encourage our body's immune systems to help us heal. The author is a Harvard Medical school graduate. He has one chapter near the end of the book titled Cancer as a Special Case.
Throughout the book he mentions the pessimistic stance of many doctors who predict the worst - which of course can affect the mind and body of the patient usually in a negative way. I highly recommend this book. The case studies of miraculous healings are amazing and he has many helpful ideas which can boost immunity.
13 people found this helpful
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Katy
4.0 out of 5 stars Good information
Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2017
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I did get a lot out of this book on ways to deal with illnesses and the best practices for the best possible quality of life. However it was written decades ago, would love a current version.
5 people found this helpful
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Fiona
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 4, 2017
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Very interesting and useful; as a cancer survivor I've learned a lot
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars thank you
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 23, 2019
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inspiring read
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PJ
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 25, 2018
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a great gift
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hiyalm43
5.0 out of 5 stars Spontaneous Healing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2012
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The (used) book arrived on time and its condition was as described. This book has been my "bible" for the past 12 years and I wanted to share it with my daughter-in-law, to whom it was sent. Thank you for the wonderful service.
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m k fiddimore
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 24, 2015
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Makes you think!
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