DOCTOR LOOKS FOR MEDICAL ALTERNATIVES

With his bald pate and distinctive white beard, Dr. Andrew Weil is the
public face of the integrative health movement, a blend of conventional
medicine and alternative treatments that include Chinese herbs, meditation,
acupuncture, vitamin supplements, and -- in Weil's case -- a flood of green
tea.

A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Weil's mission is to win acceptance
among doctors as well as the public for the notion that flax seed and fresh
vegetables, breathing exercises and massage, may be as important in
maintaining health as a pill that lowers blood pressure.

By several measures he's been highly successful.

Despite sharp criticism of Weil by some academics, programs in integrative
medicine, like the one he founded at the University of Arizona, are
cropping up at medical schools all over the country, including his alma
mater, Harvard. Clinics that share his philosophy can be found at some of
the most prestigious medical centers.

His last four books, including a newly released cookbook -- "The Healthy
Kitchen," co-written with Rosie Daley, once Oprah Winfrey's personal chef
- -- have all topped the bestseller lists. His Web site, recently reorganized
under new ownership, was once valued at $25 million; his newsletter brings
in more than $7 million a year.

Indeed, there are many sides to Andrew Weil. He is a scientist with an open
mind toward some but not all non-Western healing; a popularizer with a
significant following who dislikes the term "guru"; and a celebrity who
wants to be taken seriously by skeptical colleagues in academic medicine.

And there is also Andrew Weil the enterprise, with a brand name and the
large staff needed to support his varied efforts. After years of refusing
to market health care products, he's now selling his own line of vitamin
supplements and a special kind of green tea on his Web site, www.drweil.com.

And his business manager is looking for new ways to bring in more profits
by marketing health kits and striking deals with corporations.

Weil's share of the income from the Web -- but not from the books and
newsletter -- will eventually go to a private foundation that promotes
integrative medicine.

He says that with his company Polaris Health, which owns the Web site, he
is following the example of actor Paul Newman who uses sales of his salad
dressings and spaghetti sauce to advance the causes he believes in.

"I never thought I'd be an enterprise," Weil said in a recent interview in
San Francisco, one of many stops in a month-long tour to promote his new
book. On the way to lunch, on a street corner, he encounters a polite fan,
a man who tells him that Weil's books have changed his life.

Public Acceptance

Weil believes the public long ago accepted non-conventional medicine.

"My cause is to try to change medical education and train a new generation
of doctors," Weil said.

At the same time, his growing name recognition has become a marketable
commodity. Says his business manager, Richard Baxter: "We are the No. 1
brand name there is in the area."

Weil, who turns 60 in June, was born in Philadelphia, where his parents ran
a millinery supply store. He traces his interest in alternative medicine to
a year he spent after high school in a program that placed students with
families in other countries.

As an undergraduate, he studied botany under the tutelage of a professor
who traveled the world in search of medicinal drugs from native healers. As
an editor and reporter at the Harvard Crimson, he wrote the first stories
on two young Harvard faculty members -- Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert --
who were experimenting with psychedelic drugs along with their students and
were fired after Weil's stories appeared.

Weil was also part of an amateur theater company that included in its ranks
Stockard Channing, John Lithgow and Tommy Lee Jones. He says the theater
helped him become a confident public speaker.

As a bona fide child of the 1960s, he was part of a rebellious group of
medical students who pushed for changes in the curriculum and who set up a
note-taking service that allowed students to skip classes. For his medical
school thesis, he conducted one of the first studies of the physiological
effects of marijuana and today endorses its medicinal use.

Although he completed an internship at University of California-San
Francisco, it was years before he practiced medicine. Instead, he traveled
the world on a fellowship in search of natural medicines and native
healers. He then wrote the first of his nine books, "The Natural Mind: A
New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness."

Over the years, he has primarily made his living as a writer. In addition
to the books, he edits his newsletter, shapes a daily question-and-answer
feature on drweil.com, and writes a monthly column for the granddaddy of
all modern health magazines, Prevention, with a circulation of 3 million.

His last three books have sold more than 5 million copies in the United
States and the newsletter is now the second-most popular health newsletter
in the country, says its publisher, David Thorne.

In the March issue, the publication urged readers to "unwind with green tea."

Has Backed Away

A piece on insomnia was an occasion for him to back away from earlier
advice to use kava to treat sleeplessness. New evidence suggests that kava
can cause serious liver damage in long-term users.

Weil says he has always been careful to adjust his advice on herbal and
other remedies when indicated by scientific evidence. Many years ago he
recommended beta-carotene for cancer prevention, but changed his view when
evidence showed that high doses may, in fact, promote rather than prevent
certain cancers.

Weil has no quarrel with research that finds untoward effects of
unconventional remedies. "But that has to be put into perspective, when you
look at pharmaceutical drugs," he said. "The estimates are that
pharmaceutical drugs are killing 100,000 people a year in hospitals alone,
and that's correctly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs. That's a day and
night difference over anything you see in herbal medicine."

Weil is riled by one recent federally funded study showing that St. John's
wort, a popular herbal remedy, is no better than a dummy pill -- a placebo
- -- for the treatment of major depression.

Weil says that the herb was never recommended for severe depression and
should have been tested in patients with milder forms of the disorder.

One Validation

At the same time, he points to another government-funded study that affirms
the effectiveness of natural fish oils in preventing or delaying heart
disease. "I've been telling people for years to increase their consumption
of omega-3 fatty acids, the oil in fish," he said.

At the University of Arizona, he is one of the principal investigators
receiving federal funds to test a variety of approaches to common pediatric
complaints, including the use of Echinacea to treat recurrent ear
infections and chamomile tea for abdominal pain.

Although his most recent books have all been on health, Weil continues to
stand by his earlier writings on the effects and benefits of mind-altering
drugs. But that early interest in drugs -- and his refusal to back down --
has added to the criticism he receives from medical colleagues.

His chief nemesis may well be Dr. Arnold S. Relman, the former editor of
the New England Journal of Medicine, who has debated Weil and in 1998 wrote
a scathing review of all of Weil's books for the New Republic.

Today, Relman continues to be dismissive of Weil's beliefs. "Everybody
knows massage and a nice warm bath can make sick people feel better,"
Relman said. "Except for that, there's not a shred of hard, credible
quantitative, objective evidence that thinking good thoughts and takings
herb and accessing prayer can change the course of an actual physical illness."

For his part, Weil dismisses Relman as a "closed-minded skeptic . . . He
says, 'Just show me the evidence, I'm for the evidence' but then anything
you show him, he says, 'Oh, that's not evidence.' "

Weil has his defenders.

"He's been a pioneer," said Dr. Ellen Hughes, education director at UCSF's
Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

"People who are out front wind up becoming targets as well," said Dr.
William B. Stewart, medical director for the Institute for Health and
Healing at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.

Others call this new, more inclusive view of medicine "alternative and
complementary," terms Weil does not embrace. "I don't like alternative
because it sounds like hippie medicine to me," he said. "'I don't like
complementary medicine because that makes it sound like conventional
medicine is the most important and the other things are adjunctive. I like
integrative because it implies inclusiveness and it's the term that's
catching on with academics."

Weil places himself in the middle of this new movement: too conservative
for some tastes, but too far out for others. "I like to be attacked equally
by both sides. It tells me I'm in the right place."

He is skeptical, for example, of studies of distant healing, including one
that claims that prayer in and of itself can improve the health of AIDS
patients who don't even know they are being prayed for.

"There's a saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence," he says. "If it's true, it would completely rewrite our models
of cause and effect."

Today, Weil, a divorced father of a 10-year-old, lives on land that borders
Saguara National Park outside Tucson.

Even as he promotes his latest book, he is beginning to research his next
project -- a book and television series on longevity. Just a few weeks from
his 60th birthday, Weil adds: "My contemporaries say to hurry up and write it."