Giving folk medicine a chance

Press, 16 February 1984, Page 17

Giving folk medicine a chance

From

MICHAEL CONLON,

Reuters, in Chicago

If modern medicine is to advance any farther, it may have to step back and take a closer look at the common wart, according to a physician who has toured the world of health and healing. The wart is a mystery, says Andrew Weil, because of the almost magical ways it can be cured by the apparent power of the mind — documented cures ranging from raw potatoes buried by the light of the moon to touches by healers and bargains made with friends or siblings. Dr Weil believes there are more ways to prevent and heal illness than most people realise, a mixture that covers the likes of faith healers, chiropractors, Chinese medicine, and voodoo. The wart and its cures are part of the theme for his new book, “Health and Healing.”

Like wart cures which cannot be explained, the Harvard-educated physician says, traditional medicine as practised in the West tends to reject the unknown and turn treatment into a high-tech mystery which patients are not expected to grasp. “I think every system I’ve looked

at cures some of the people some of the time, and every system fails to work some of the time,” he adds. “There are some things that regular medicine does terrifically, such as immunising against infections, trauma, medical and surgical emergencies. And there are others that it doesn’t do very well — like treating viral infections and dealing with cancer and chronic degenerative disease.”

Dr Weil is a traditionallyschooled doctor, but when he was suffering from a chest pain diagnosed some years ago as an esophageal spasm he found no relief until a California homeopath cured him. His book is a well-drawn roadmap to the history and modern practice of homeopathy, osteopathy, naturopathy, psychic healing, shamanism, and almost every know form of treatment. “I think there’s an awful lot wrong with traditional medical school teaching. An enormous

amount of irrelevant information is presented. A lot is left out,” he says. “There is essentially no teaching about nutrition, no teaching about alternative medicine, and there is really very little teaching about the mind. “A lot of this book is about the interaction of the mind and body, a whole avenue of treatment that is not taken very seriously or exploited in regular medicine.” Wart cures, he says, are an example. Dr Weil has compiled a long and growing list of the nonmedical ways people have rid themselves of the unwanted viral skin growths: rubbing with a cut potato which is then buried under a tree by the light of the moon; handling a certain kind of animal; visiting a neighbourhood wart healer; selling the wart to a friend for money. Typically, the wart victim following a folk cure employs it in the afternoon or evening and finds

the wart gone at dawn’s light, leaving clean, pink skin. If the cure doesn’t come the next morning, it happens over several days. Perhaps half of the population has had first-hand knowledge of such cures, Dr Weil says, all of which have nothing in common but that they work. Warts appear to be “susceptible to virtually instant healing brought about by belief in treatments that cannot have significant direct effects on the viruses or the ... tissue.” The key to folk cures is clearly in the mind, Dr Weil says, although no-one has found a way to turn it on and off at will, or understands exactly how it works. In the case of warts it could be changes in the blood or nerves, or a triggering of the body’s immune system.

Yet, if it works for warts, it could also work for calcium deposits, tumors, and a variety of other ailments, Dr Weil writes. “It is quite possible that the body can get rid of even large masses of cancerous tissue as easily as it can separate itself from a cutaneous wart, perhaps by the same mechanism.

“Documented cases exist of spontaneous remissions of most forms of cancer. In some of these, large tumors have disappeared within hours or days. “If I were in charge of dispersing government funds for cancer research I would certainly allot a large portion of them to studies of the mechanism of wart cures.” Dr Weil believes that traditional doctors should take a hard look at where their system is leading them.

“What will medical costs be be in the year 2000 if present trends continue?” he asks. “What will be the incidence of iatrogenic (Doctorcaused) illness? Will public health really be better than today or will cancer be striking one in every three or two rather than one in every four, even as treatment methods improve?”

Dr Weil tells his readers that most of what he knows about staying healthy did not come from his training as a doctor. “I learned it from observation of myself and others, from intuition and thought, and from my own experience. You can do the same,” he says.