Review: Spontaneous Healing by Andrew Weil

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Spontaneous Healing by Andrew Weil
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Mark another one under the label 'Books not worth finishing'. In order to give full disclosure I should probably point out that I have spent some time with Dr. Weil personally and actually like him quite a bit. He's an interesting, likable man who has some progressive ideas about health care. I should probably also point out that I am in the medical profession myself.

I first met Dr. Weil while doing my undergrad in Complementary and Alternative Health at his rival school ASU. Although I found his ideas to be interesting, albeit somewhat short-sighted, until a week or so ago I never had any interest in picking up any of his books (I was confronted by a friend of mine who claimed that Dr. Weil says that "most doctors are duds" - a point that even after reading this book I don't think he holds). You see, in medicine you hear his story all of the time which somewhat explains the inability of alternative medicine to be widely accepted by traditional medical practitioners. Dr. Weil, and many other like him, quickly denigrates the treatment and training of allopathic and osteopathic physicians in favor of "natural" healing modalities, almost favoring the lack of scientific evidence over tested and tried methods of practice.

Spontaneous Healing is essentially Dr. Weil's personal apologetics for the primary use of "natural" medicine masked by the topic of the body's ability to self-heal. The book essentially starts off by providing multiple anecdotal illustrations of the miracles of alternative health when traditional medicine has failed. Now admittedly these stories are exciting and inspiring but they are also manipulative. I'm not one to ignore the power of nature or write off the seemingly miraculous despite lack of physical evidence - after all there is a reason I studied this in undergrad (in fact I almost decided to become a naturopathic doctor). The problem is that Dr. Weil's ideas can lead to dangerous practices such as the abandonment of proven medical treatments for the esoteric and romantic.

As the book goes on, Dr. Weil makes a case for "spontaneous healing", essentially utilizing the body's ability to heal itself. No doctor in their right mind would argue the idea that the body is intrinsically capable of self-healing but Dr. Weil pushed the point past logic. Many contemporary allopathic and osteopathic medical treatments indeed already utilize the body's own ability to heal itself - in fact, we use treatments on a regular basis that stimulate the body's immune reaction or cellular messages to create self-healing. The problem is that Dr. Weil finds superiority in practices that have little or no scientific basis.

I could only read so far into the book before throwing up my hands and saying "give me a break!" In my opinion, Dr. Weil has made some very beneficially changes to health care and I truly think that there are many unproven alternative modalities in medicine that can be beneficial to people in need of health care but without any checks and balances, these treatments can also be harmful and prevent the healing of diseases which would benefit from medical intervention. Dr. Weil is essentially a hippy doctor who decided early that anything except for traditional medical principles must be superior. His opinions on medical treatment and theory are largely based on the miraculous and anecdotal.

I agree with his thoughts that a collaborative system of complementary medicine would be beneficial to society but I think some of the ideas he advocates are shallowed by their inconsistency and lack of evidence. While I am grateful for the attention he has been able to give to alternative modalities - of which many certainly have their place in health care - I found this book to be an off-putting distortion of health and potentially dangerous to those who need serious medical intervention.

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