Andrew Weil

Andrew Weil, MD is an American author and physician, best known for establishing and popularizing the field of integrative medicine.

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• Drugs are just one way of satisfying that need. The advantage of drugs is that they provide these experiences immediately and there's no requirement for work. The disadvantage of drugs is that when they wear off you haven't learned anything. They don't teach you how to do it the next time. If you rely on the drug as the way of changing consciousness, that leads to dependence on drugs. The other point I made in The Natural Mind was that the experiences people have come from within, they come from the nervous system. The drug, or whatever other external thing is done, is a trigger or releaser of that innate experience.

• I cast a very wide net, using all my senses. I listen, and I look and I read and when I come across things that are interesting I follow them up and see what I can find out about them. If I come across something that doesn't fit with accepted conceptions, it really catches my interest, it's something that I want to know about.

• I have a very strong sense of my own -- of what's right -- and I'm able to operate fairly independent of all that kind of storm that goes on. And maybe I would relate that to my upbringing, and as I said, being an only child and having learned to be independent, and think for myself, and operate on my own. I would say, more than difficult, it was lonely for a long time. Because there were not other doctors out there who were advocating the kinds of things that I was doing. And I was often attacked from both sides. From the alternative side for being too mainstream, and from the mainstream side for being too alternative.

• It is consumer demand which is forcing change within the medical profession right now.

• Look at what happens when you cut your finger. You don't have to go to a finger healer, you don't have to pray for your finger to heal, all you have to do is make sure it's clean and it will heal. That's all the evidence you need that the body has the capacity to repair itself.

• Often I'm on talk shows and hosts will ask, "How do you feel about it, when people say, you're controversial?" And I say that, "I think if I stop being controversial I wouldn't be doing my job." I mean, this is just the kind of things that I hone in on. I'm interested, as I said, in what doesn't fit established conceptions, in looking at things that don't fit accepted models. And in trying to determine what's true and useful.

• One of the products of that work was my first book, The Natural Mind, which laid out a theory that humans are born with an innate need to alter their consciousness, and considered the psychological and social implications of that. This need can be satisfied in many ways, drugs being just one of them.