The Dr. Hyman Show - Activating Your Natural Healing Systems with Dr. Andrew Weil

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, InsideTracker, and Rupa Health.   When we think about optimizing health, we need to think about redesigning life in a way that supports a healthspan that matches our lifespan. But sadly, most of us know more about our cars or iPhones than we do about our bodies. One of the greatest downfalls of that is that many people don’t trust our bodies’ natural ability to heal. Today, I’m so excited to talk to an old friend and pioneer of integrative medicine whose work has guided my path as a doctor, Dr. Andrew Weil. We take a deep dive into the body’s innate healing capacity and how food is our greatest ally to support that process.  Dr. Andrew Weil is a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine. Combining a Harvard education and a lifetime of practicing natural and preventive medicine, he is the founder and director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where he is a clinical professor of medicine and professor of public health. A New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Weil is the author of 15 books on health and wellbeing, including Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better, and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own; Fast Food, Good Food; True Food: Seasonal, Sustainable, Simple, Pure; Spontaneous Happiness; Healthy Aging; and Eight Weeks to Optimum Health. He is the editorial director of DrWeil.com, the leading online resource for healthy living based on the philosophy of integrative medicine. He is also a founder and partner in the growing family of True Food Kitchen restaurants.   This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, InsideTracker, and Rupa Health.   BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough is offering 10% off your next order at magbreakthrough.com/hyman with the code hyman10 at checkout.   InsideTracker is offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman.   Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.   Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version):  How studying botany at Harvard shaped Dr. Weil’s perspective in medical school and beyond (7:31 / 3:45)  Activating the body’s own healing mechanisms to create health (15:26 / 11:41)  Inflammation as the common root of chronic disease (19:26 /  16:03)  Anti-inflammatory diet and foods (25:41 / 20:33)  Understanding the mind-body connection (33:52 / 29:06)  How to start incorporating healing practices into your life and your patient’s lives (38:54 / 33:48)   The backwards economics of our current healthcare system (44:27 / 39:10)  Staying healthy as you age (47:32 / 42:28)  Dr. Weil’s daily health practices (54:45 / 49:36)  Emerging research on the therapeutic effects of mushrooms (56:42 / 52:18)  Learn more about Dr. Weil and his work at his website, drweil.com.

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Now, let's get back to this week's episode of the doctor's pharmacy welcome to the doctor's pharmacy i'm dr mark hyman that's pharmacy with f a place for conversations that matter and if you were at all interested in exploring your health uh we today have the godfather of health, Dr. Andrew Weiland, who's been a critical, important figure in my life, influencing so much of my thinking and actually getting me started on this path. He is an icon, cover of Time Magazine. He's a pioneer in the field of integrative medicine.

He went to Harvard and then took a left turn from the traditional medical academic world and started to looking into other ways of thinking about creating healing. And he then magically somehow, I don't know how you did this, but you got to create an integrated medicine center at the University of Arizona with a colleague of yours. I think his name was Jim something. I forget. Who was it? Dolan. Yeah.

Yeah. I think his name was Jim something, I forget. Who was it? Dallin, yeah. Yeah, Jim Dallin, who I talked to, who basically was smart enough to see the future and actually invited you to start this program. You've authored over 15 books. Many have been hugely influential to me. Most people don't know that your first book was From Chocolate to Morphine, which is all about the influence of plant compounds on our mental functioning and on our health. And now we're seeing this renaissance of the psychedelic movement, which, you know, was really sort of presaged by a lot of your work. And one of your important books that I think

really highly influenced me was Spontaneous Healing and Healthy Aging and Eight Weeks to Optimal Health. What most people don't know is that you were also a doctor at Canyon Ranch and preceded me by many years and actually started the whole initiative there of integrative medicine. And I kind of piggybacked on that and started to work in your ranch many years after you started. And you always sort of your presence and your thoughts and your influence really has always influenced me in a really remarkable way. And you also were really instrumental in getting integrative medicine programs started all around the country. The Consortium of Academic Centers for Integrative Medicine was hugely funded and has really impacted healthcare in such a beneficial way. So Andy, I'm so happy to have this conversation with you.

Oh, thanks. Good. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. I mean, you've been such a leader and icon for me. And I don't know if you know this story, but I was asked to help as a on-call doctor for Canyon Ranch in Lenox many years ago in the early 90s. And I didn't really know about it.

I'd never visited the property. But they said, well, you can use this health resort and you can use the spa and you can use the fitness facilities. I'm like, okay, it's like a gym membership. So I started it. And then I was at the local bookstore here in Lenox and I was buying spontaneous healing. And this woman, Christine Huffman came up to me who had a tag on this at Canyon Ranch. And she's like, oh, that's a great book. I know Andy Weil. I was like, yeah, I just

got on the call schedule at Canyon Ranch. She's like, you want to come over and take a tour? I'm like, sure. So I went over and talked about my vision for healthcare and medicine and how important your influence was on me and the thinking I wanted to be doing around integrative medicine. And she's like, why don't you come for a tour? So I came for a tour. And next thing I know, she offers me a job as the medical director after I met the owners. And that was sort of the beginning of my career in this whole field. So you had a lot to do with it. That was great.

Thanks for telling me. So, Andy, you went to Harvard in the 60s. You were in the era of the 60s revolution. Yeah. And you had a different way of thinking about things. And something led you to kind of take a left turn and not pursue the traditional medical path. And you went to South America and you discovered some things that set you on the career you're on. So take us through that story briefly and tell us

how you got inspired to do that and what happened and what you were led to come to think about. Well, I think I took a left turn long before I went to medical school. I was always interested in plants and that led me to be a botany major as an undergraduate at Harvard, which was a very unusual choice of major in those days. And that gave me a unique perspective when I entered medical school. You know, I was really tuned into the natural world, and it was a real shock to find that the people teaching me pharmacology in medical school knew nothing about the plant sources of the drugs that they were teaching about, you know, much less about how they differed from isolated compounds. And also I had a longstanding interest in the mind

and how the mind influenced the body. And I tried to study that as an undergraduate, but it was not possible in those days. And the mind was simply left out of the equation in medical school, as you know. When I finished my internship in San Francisco in 1969, I decided I didn't want to practice the kind of medicine that I had learned. First, because I saw it do too much harm, mostly in the form of adverse drug reactions. And secondly, because it really didn't equip me to keep people healthy. You know, I learned nothing about health, healing, how to keep people from getting sick. And I thought that should be my main function as a doctor.

Wow. That's the way that you just said that basically in medical school, you learn nothing about how to keep people healthy, which is such a statement, right? I know. And much less have time or incentive to keep myself healthy, you know, going through medical school. Anyway, I dropped out of medicine. I made my living for a number of years as a writer. I found ways to travel around the world, as you mentioned, looking at other kinds of medical systems and medical practice.

I spent time with shamans. I was interested in psychoactive plants and drugs and foods and other cultures. So I did that for about three and a half years. I saw a lot of interesting stuff. And then my car broke down in Tucson in 1973. And I never left. I never would have thought that I'd be living here. But it turned out the person I had most to learn from was in Tucson.

And he'd actually been here the whole time and didn't know about him. And that was an old osteopathic. Osteopathord. He was in his 80s when I met him. And I think was the most effective healer I've ever met. He used hands-on manipulation, no equipment. He charged $35 for a visit. He didn't say much, but it was so good to be worked on by him. And people would say when should i come back and he'd say you don't have to come back you're fixed and he also would say things like you know you just make these adjustments and let old mother nature do her work yeah anyway i saw him affect remarkable cures of everything from recurrent ear infections and kids to chronic gi conditions and he really made me aware of the healing power of nature.

Again, something missing from my medical education. And how possible it was to use low-tech medicine to facilitate healing. So that was a revelation to me. And I began giving talks to medical students. I began lecturing in the medical school on alternative medicine. Nobody even knew what alternative medicine was in those days. Nobody knew the difference between an osteopath and a chiropractor, for example. That's right.

Yeah. I'm sure you remember. I remember. I remember the Holistic Health Handbook, which kind of was the first. It was like published in the 70s. And I studied, I took a course in holistic health at Goddard College in a summer program. And we had this handbook that had everything from crystals to osteopathy to homeopathy. It was pretty interesting.

Yeah, and there was a holistic medical movement in Arizona, as I'm sure there was in other parts of the country. But no doctors were members of it. It was nurses, psychologists, social workers. And for through the seventies, I was talking, began writing about my ideas about health. No, none of my medical colleagues paid any attention to me. You know, I got a larger and larger following in the general public, but really no one in medicine cared about what I was saying. And that didn't change until the early 1990s. That was when Jim Dolan came to be dean of the medical college. But it was the time when the economics of healthcare began to go south. And the conclusion that I draw from that is that no amount of ideological argument moves anything.

It's only when the pocketbooks of institutions get squeezed that they begin to open to new ideas. So I was calling what I did natural and preventive medicine, and then I came to use the term integrative medicine, which seemed to me more acceptable. Yeah. And the whole idea was that there are all these modalities out there that are incredibly effective that have basically been in the diaspora of healthcare for centuries and maybe actually be central to this most important idea that we've ignored which is how do we create health yep not how do we facilitate healing which i think you know comes from within but there's also a lot of nonsense

out there and i think I think the job of people in integrative medicine is to sift through it all and sort out what is useful and sensible from what isn't. Well, you know, you've catalyzed literally millions and millions and millions of dollars of research on integrative medicine by bringing it into academia and saying, look, there's value here. Let's look at it, whether it's acupuncture. And you spawned a whole generation of doctors from Byron Berman to Tracy Gaudette, who worked at the VA. I mean, she tried to get me to come and run your program in Arizona because I was at your program in 1997 at Kenya Ranch. We had a week-long program there. And you had the white beard there. You looked the same. You don't look any different than you did. That's what people

tell me. Like 30 years ago. I don't know what you're doing. It's like you've sort of frozen in time. And so Tracy tried to get me to work for you. She ended up running the VA. Now she's running the Whole Health Institute for Alice Walton where they funded $200 million. You're building a medical school. You've got so many people that I know that are in my network that have been your students who now are actually driving the future change.

And I imagine that's got to be so satisfying for you to see. It's like you're just not this guy at the end of the road in some ranch in Tucson who's telling people to go to the osteopath. You really catalyze an entire transformation in healthcare. Yeah. Next week on the 16th of March, we are having a groundbreaking at the university for our new building for our center, which is a big milestone. And I'm very proud of the accomplishments of, it's now called the Andrew Weil Center, which I find it hard to bring myself to say it's the Andrew Weil Center of the University of Arizona Integrative Medicine.

But we now have graduated, I think, upwards of 2,500 physicians from our intensive fellowship, and they're in all specialties, all ages. And then we're training residents. I think 100 residencies have now put our curriculum into the residency training in a number of different fields. I think it's a realistic goal that one day every practitioner will have had basic education and nutrition and mind-body medicine and the strengths and weaknesses of these other medical systems. It's true. I think the new generation of doctors is really changing. I'm reached out to all the time, as I'm sure you are, by people who want to go to medical school, who are in medical school, or residency, who are like, I don't like this. This is not what I want. What's out there? And

they want support and guidance. And I think it's so important. I'd love you to talk about, you know, this book, Spontaneous Healing was so influential for me. And it talked about the healing power of nature and the healing power of the body and how to activate that. And we share, we both went to medical school and we didn't take a course on creating health 101. It just didn't exist. And yet it's so central because when you learn how to activate the body's own healing mechanisms, the body knows what to do. And most diseases can be taken care of by providing the right conditions. And the science of creating health is so central to integrative medicine.

So talk about how do we start to think about defining health? How do we measure health? How do we measure health? How do we create health? How have you used both food and mind-body practices and other alternative modalities to help activate the healing that you say we all possibly have access to without knowing it? First of all, it's hardly a new idea. Hippocrates said we should revere the healing power of nature. I mean, that was his first precept. So, to me,

when I asked many medical colleagues to define health, a common answer I get is the absence of disease. And that's not very helpful. You know, I think health is a positive state of balance, equilibrium, wholeness, and a major quality of it is resilience so that you can go through life and not get thrown off balance by all the things out there that have the potential to harm you. You know, it is remarkable that most people are mostly healthy most of the time when you think about all the things that can go wrong, both within the body and outside the body. I mean, it is marvelous. And we never stopped to think about that. And as you said, it's absolutely true that most diseases end by themselves. And they end

because the body's healing mechanisms take care of them. And we can take credit for that, but it's not usually our doing. And I would love to see a course at the beginning of medical school on the healing system of the human organism. You know, I didn't learn anything about that. You know, it makes use of the immune system, the nervous system, circulatory system. But there are these internal healing mechanisms that keep us in balance. And that's good medicine should start from thinking about, you know, why isn't healing happening here? What can we do from outside that might facilitate it, you know, remove obstacles to it?

That seems to me is our main job. It's true. And I think most people don't realize there is a healing system in the body. Absolutely. There is actually our innate mechanisms for repair, regeneration, renewal, fighting infection. It exists and we see it, right? I mean, we cut our skin. You cut your skin.

It's easier to talk about this with kids than it is with doctors. You know, watch what happens when you get an owie and that same thing happens throughout the body. Yeah. And my experience is that most people have no confidence in that. And I think that's one of the great things we can do for people, if we understand that, is to give them greater confidence in their body's healing ability so that they can be less dependent on practitioners of all sorts. So can you break down, what are the elements of our body's healing system so people understand

what we're talking about? Well, clearly the immune system is central to that. That's our major defense system, which protects us against infection and pathogenic organisms and cancer and foreign things that can harm us. But I think the nervous system is key that regulates the immune system. The nervous system connects to the mind and you can't separate the mind from the body. And there are all sorts of ways that what goes on in our mental emotional sphere influences what happens in our physical sphere. So it's all connected. But this is, you know, at any level of biological organization that you look at, you see inherent

mechanisms of repair, even in the DNA molecule itself, which if it's injured, begins to make repair enzymes to correct it. Yeah. And, you know, one of your books was on healthy eating, on how do we eat. And it was a huge influence on shifting my thinking on what to take out of my diet, what to put into my diet, how to rethink what we should be eating and how food is medicine. And that is a huge component of activating our healing system. Absolutely.

And you had asked me some questions about inflammation and its importance. And you know that I've developed an anti-inflammatory diet, an anti-inflammatory pyramid. And, you know, this to me is one of the great revolutions in medical thinking. When I was in medical school, I was taught that diseases like coronary artery disease and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer were completely separate disease entities that had nothing in common. Yes. And now it turns out that they may have a common root in inappropriate chronic low-level

inflammation. You know, coronary artery disease begins as inflammation in the lining of arteries. Alzheimer's begins as inflammation in the lining of arteries. Alzheimer's begins as inflammation in the brain. And cancer is connected also because anything that increases inflammation stimulates cells to divide more frequently. And you can't separate those two things. Anything that is pro-inflammatory also drives malignancy. So the good news is that if all these disease processes, which are the big things that kill and disable people prematurely, have a common root, then there's common strategies for dealing with them. And that is to contain inappropriate inflammation. Inflammation is a critical function of the body.

You know, it's critical to healing. It's the way the body gets more immune activity and nourishment to an area that needs it. And we all know it on the surface of the body, it's local heat, redness, swelling, and pain. But it's very important that inflammation stay where it's supposed to stay and ends when it's supposed to end. If it doesn't, it becomes productive of disease. And this is a problem I think many of us go through life in a pro-inflammatory state. There's lots of influences on that, but diet is a big one and it's one that potentially we have control over. Yeah. So I think that's really true. I remember recently I had a patient who had an autoimmune disease and she said, Dr. Hyman, would you mind talking to my rheumatologist

about, you know, what my care is about. And I was searching for the causes of inflammation. Was it her diet? Was it her microbiome? Did she have an late infection? You know, what were the triggers? And I was like, oh, you know, you get those calls. You're like, oh, this doctor, it's going to be an argument. He's not going to get it.

It's a waste of my time, but I'll do it. I get on the phone with the guy, and he's a Cedars-Sinai rheumatologist. And he's like, oh, Dr. Hyman, I've been using anti-inflammatory diet with my patients. You have no idea how well it works. Fabulous. Great. I'm glad to hear it. And I think there's a sort of a shift in doctors understanding this.

You've got like William Lee writing the book, Eat to Beat Disease. And there's a really increasing understanding that food is not just calories, that it's actually medicine. It's information. And the molecules in there, the phytochemicals i mean that was your original work was understanding ethnobotany and the power of plant compounds that actually regulate our biology and and nowhere is that more important than food and i don't think people grasp the power of food to actually not only prevent disease but actually to treat and reverse disease yeah and rheumatology is made to

order for integrative medicine. It's those diseases. First of all, they have a high tendency to go into remission, which is great because you can take credit for that. The mind-body component hits you in the face. A typical story of the onset of rheumatoid arthritis in a young woman is flare up of old joints within 24 hours of a serious emotional trauma. And then there are these influences of diet. There are many natural remedies. So you'd think that integrative rheumatology would be a really robust field.

It is slowly coming into being. We've had a number of rheumatologists go through our fellowship, and they're interested in working together. So I hope one day that'll be, you know, before we immediately turn to these very powerful immune suppressive drugs, uh, we should try these lifestyle adjustments and, and see how we can modify those diseases. Yeah. And, and, and I think people don't realize that there, there are ways to figure out the cause of inflammation. You know, I had a patient who, who, uh, did an elimination diet, elimination diet as part of reading my book, The 10-Day Detox, which is essentially getting rid of a lot of inflammatory foods, and gluten was one

of them. He's like, Dr. Hyman, is it possible that my rheumatoid arthritis can go away in 10 days? And I'm like, well, yes, if it was something you're eating, and for him it was. It's not all the causes of rheumatoid arthritis are the same. It could be a parasite. It could be gluten. It could be a Lyme disease, it could be-

Environmental toxins. Environmental toxins, yeah. Yeah, they call those autogens, which drive inflammation. Right. Yeah, so this is, I think, a real revolution in thinking about the role of inflammation in chronic disease and ways of moderating it. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. One of the most important tools I have for helping my patients optimize their health is testing. And that is why I love what Rupa Health is doing. Functional medicine testing can require placing orders with lots of different labs and it can

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much needed option in the functional medicine space and it means better service for you and your patients. You can check it out with a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health.com. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. So what would be your anti-inflammatory diet? Let's sort of break it down. Because I think what you said is so important, is that all diseases of aging and all chronic illness is really inflammatory disease at some level.

Yes, yes. So I think it starts with what you don't eat because the mainstream American diet is strongly pro-inflammatory. It gives us the wrong fats, the wrong kinds of carbohydrates, and not enough of the protective elements, which are mostly in fruits, vegetables, or spices.

So the first rule is to stop the refined, processed, and manufactured food. You know, that's simple. I mean, that's really what's doing us in. So see if you can eliminate that from the diet. And then- I remember you on Larry King once, and I heard you say, the two things that I would recommend everybody, non-negotiable, are get rid of high fructose corn syrup and trans fats. And I stole it from you because it was so brilliant. And I'm like, if you do that, basically, you get rid of a lot of the junk out there.

Well, the trans fats have mostly been phased out. But we now have, you know, our manufactured food is flooded with refined vegetable oils which are sources of pro-inflammatory fatty acids and they're in there because we've made them cheap through federal subsidies same with high fructose corn syrup so that has to change and uh but the first step of the anti-inflammatory diet is eliminating as much as possible those kinds of foods then you want to eat a wide variety of produce and i I think more concentrated on vegetables than fruits because fruits can be concentrated sugar sources. But you want to eat a great variety of vegetables of all different colors. Those all have protective elements in them. Same for herbs and spices. The most powerful natural anti-inflammatory agent is

turmeric, the yellow spice, ginger ginger which is related also but those are you know tea green tea at the very top of my anti-inflammatory pyramid is dark chocolate you mean your personal pyramid or is this is this actually my pyramid i reckon no no dark chocolate in moderation has a lot of protective compounds in it. And then I don't believe that carbohydrates are bad foods as some of the extreme keto and paleo people believe. I think you have to learn which carbohydrates are better and which are worse. And in general, the ones that quickly digest into blood sugar and raise blood sugar, and that's mostly things made from flour or containing sugar, those are

not good. They promote inflammation. Whereas slow digesting carbohydrates like you find in beans and winter squashes and sweet potatoes, no, those are okay. Yeah, and even like vegetables, like asparagus is a carbohydrate. Our chokes are carbohydrate. Broccoli is a carbohydrate. Right.

So actually, you know, I joke and I say carbohydrates are the most essential thing we need for health and longevity because that's where all the phytochemicals are. Right. Right. Right. It's, it's, it's not the garbage carbohydrates that we're eating.

Yeah. I was talking to Dan Buechner the other day, the blue zone. Oh yeah. I love him. And we were talking about beans, you know, which have been really vilified in the,

in the keto paleo world. And he said that one of the common threads that they've seen in all the Blue Zone areas is regular consumption of beans. They're good foods. They're cheap. They're available. They have a lot of fiber, a lot of minerals, a lot of phytonutrients, slow-digesting carbohydrate. They have protein.

They have everything to recommend. It's true. I was in Sardinia last summer at one of the blue zones and dan hooked me up and i had this great adventure and you know one of their core staple foods is minestrone which is filled with beans and vegetables right right it's so good really good so so it's and it's also getting an oil change right you also talk about getting an oil change, right? You also talked about getting an oil change. Yeah, a big one. I think I stole that from you too. That's a good one. I like that.

Well, I'm a big fan of olive oil, which not only is delicious and has good fatty acid profile, but it has a unique anti-inflammatory compound in it that's not found in other oils. So I think that should be your main cooking oil. It's also antiviral. Yes, true. And if you want an oil that doesn't have a flavor of olive oil, my first choice would be avocado oil. Yeah. That now has become affordable and it's got a good fatty acid profile.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone needs an oil change. And omega-3 fats you talk a lot about. And omega-3 fats, absolutely. Which probably are best gotten from the fish sources rather than taken as supplements but they're the diets mainstream diet is very deficient in omega-3 and very heavy in omega-6s which are sardines and mackerel and herring and

the small small fish right yeah and sardines i'm a big fan of kippers smoked kippers which you get any supermarket i mash them with mustard and onion and lemon. Yeah. They're great. And they're cheap. You know, this is a cheap, high quality food, good source of omega-3 fatty acids. Yeah, so true. All right.

So nutrition is pretty clear. We need to get rid of the bad stuff, put in good stuff and add these protective foods. And I think, you know, a lot of people talk about what not to eat, but you're also talking about what to eat, which is really important and which is not just what you eliminate, but it's actually the protective nature and some of these foods that we don't typically have. And I know when I go to the grocery store, I think of it as my pharmacy with an F. And I literally go through with a mind of like, because I understand what the phytochemicals are and I've studied this, I can literally go through and say, oh, I'm going to have

this drug and this drug and this drug. That's great. This is a prebiotic and this is a probiotic food. And this has high levels of catechins and this has high levels of curcuminoids. And these are high levels of ginger oils. And I'm thinking all the time about how do I actually optimize my biology by getting my medicine cabinet, otherwise known as my fridge, full of the right stuff. And you mentioned probiotics.

And this is, I think, another area of tremendous revolution in medical thinking. When I was in medical school, people who ate yogurt or took acidophilus were health nuts. You know, this was made fun of. And suddenly now we're seeing that the gut microbiome is a major determinant of physical health, of mental health, of your interactions with the environment. I mean, this is remarkable research that's being done. And then it's worth thinking about, what can you do to modify your gut microbiome in a good direction? It seems like one of the best strategies is to eat fermented foods. And I recommend learning to make them because they're,

you know, I make my own sauerkraut and pickles and kimchi. It's fun. And these are cheap foods and they're delicious and they really do good things for your insides. It's true. I used to make my own yogurt in college. My daughter now makes kimchi and I'm like, I'm like, I'm really going to eat that. It's a little, I'm like, I'm a little nervous, you know, homemade stuff is like, it's going to kill me. But my daughter's now in medical school. And it's so fascinating to actually see how little the curriculum has changed and how anachronistic it is and how they're teaching literally 19th and 20th century medicine, which is very reactive and doesn't understand this basic fundamental question that you really called us to think about, which is how do we create health? And still short changes nutrition, you know, which if it is taught as taught as biochemistry and it's forgotten as soon as the biochemistry exams are done and still omits mind body

interactions, doesn't teach about, you know, what these other medical systems have to offer. So big, big need for change. And that's what our center tries to do. You know, big need for change. And that's what our center tries to do. You know, we are remedying all the things that are not taught. It's so powerful. You know, you, you, you influenced me highly. And there was another physician that actually I met that, that actually ended up writing me a letter, a recommendation from medical school named Bernie Siegel, who you know well. Yeah. And he wrote a book called Love, Medicine, and Miracles. And he was a cancer doctor who wrote about all sorts of extraordinary stories and cases

of the power of the mind to heal the body and talked about basically the pharmacy between your ears. Yep. And another good friend of yours, Ted Katchup, also wrote a book called The Web and the Weaver about Chinese medicine, but he then went on to study the placebo effect. The placebo effect is great. Yeah. And the nocebo effect. And so, we don't really think about this when we're in our clinic with patients. We talk about stress and maybe you should meditate and it's kind of given lip service.

But when you actually look at the power of this and guys like Joe Dispenza are taking it to another level, which is a little bit of a mystery to me, but you hear these stories and you're like, wow. And your book, Spontaneous Healing, is full of these stories. So can you share a little bit about your understanding of this mind-body effect, how it works and how to activate it and what people can do to actually make it part of their daily life? You know, first of all, I would say Bernie Siegel, I think, was ahead of his time and did not get a positive reception from the academic medical community, to say the least. He couldn't believe when I was doing this at the University of Arizona, he couldn't believe that I was being

accepted out there in an academic center, but times had begun to change. I took a course in medical hypnosis at Columbia University right when I finished my internship. One of the most interesting courses I've ever taken. It was just great. And that really awoke in me the power, understanding of the power of using the mind-body connection. So I then also affiliated with a very skilled clinical hypnotherapist who was on the teaching faculty of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and still teaches on our faculty. I remember him once saying to me that he thought that all dermatological disease and all gastrointestinal disease should first go to hypnotherapy

before you go to dermatologists or gastroenterologists because those systems are the most frequent sites of expression of stress-related disorders. Anyway, mind-body medicine is a very important part of our curriculum in integrative medicine. So it's hypnotherapy, guided imagery, visualization, biofeedback, I mean, a whole range of these things. These therapies are very time effective, very cost effective, and very underutilized in medicine today. And they're even fun for both the practitioner and the patient, but we don't think of using them. And I think there is nothing that's out of the reach of the mind because everywhere you've got nerves, you've got the potential for mental influence. There have to be, there's an art

to discussing this with patients because it, as I'm sure you know, that patients can easily think that they're being accused of having imaginary diseases or making it all. Or you're blaming them for the problem. Yeah. Or that it's all in the mind, which it isn't. It's always in the mind and the body, but you can take advantage of that connection. Yeah. So how, how do you understand the biology of spontaneous healing, the biology of the mind, body, because you know, there was a, Bernie was great. He, he, he taught, I mean, it's funny, we used to write letters back in the day when we had, where there were letters and he used to write me, he was bald and he wrote me in a purple purple pen and he reminded me of harold

and the purple crayon which is my favorite childhood book but when he talked about this episode of this woman who had cancer and they basically told her that they were going to give her this brand new drug that was going to cure her cancer but it was was nothing it was a placebo and literally her cancer tumors melted away. And then a number of years later, they kind of said, well, you know, that was really just a study and it really wasn't a thing. And her cancer came back like that and she died. And so, that's just remarkable thing about it. So, again, this is another area where I think there's been a huge change in thinking, although this still has a ways to go. I think that these new brain imaging

studies that have become available to look at meditators' brains, for example, and see physical changes in the brains of people who meditate, or in placebo responses, of finding that there are brain correlates of placebo responses, it makes it real for doctors who otherwise thought this was all sort of black magic and wasn't real medicine. So I think that's changed things. Now there's now a real serious placebo studies. I think it's being looked at in a different way from the way it used to be. And you know, our friend Candice Pert, who sadly is not here anymore, she wrote a book called Molecules of Emotion. And she identified this whole phenomenon of psychoneuroimmunology, which is how our immune system is literally listening to our thoughts

and regulating what's happening. And it regulates so many things in our body that we just are beginning to understand, like telomeres, like Elizabeth Blackburn's work showing that, for example, meditation can lengthen your telomeres. Yeah. So I think that this, when I was in that hypnosis course, there is a very well-documented literature of experiments like taking a good hypnotic subject

and telling them you're touching them with a piece of hot metal and it's a finger and they get a blister. You know, the blister is real and you can do the opposite. You can touch them with a piece of hot metal and say it's cold and they don't get a blister. I mean, that's all you need to see, you know, of how powerful that

connection is and you want to take advantage of it. Yeah. And so, how do people listening start to incorporate these practices? What is your sort of basic go-to instructions for people to say, okay, we have this healing system. Our mind can kill us or it can cure us. So, just as this is an example of this cancer patient, how do you start to lean toward the cure us side of the ledger? Well, first of all, I think everyone should learn and practice some method of neutralizing the harmful effects of stress on the mind and the body. My favorite techniques are breathing exercises because they're so time effective and cost effective and efficient. In addition,

here's one strategy that I use. I can't always do it, but if you can, as a physician, introduce a patient to someone who has their disease and is now well, that is a very powerful way of giving them a message that it's possible to get better. I've had many patients over the years who've said to me in retrospect that the most important thing I did for them was that I was the only doctor they saw who told them they could get better. I mean, that makes me sad in a way that why doctors are so pessimistic. I think it's a cover your ass medicine, which is, you know, don't promise too much. Exactly. Under promise and over deliver if you can.

But it's- It's like lower expectations so you don't get in trouble or get sued. Exactly. I think another problem is that in our hospital training, we tend to see a very skewed population of sick people. We see very sick people. And in the very sick population, healing happens less regularly than it does in the general population. So I think that skews our view. But the fact is an awful lot of doctors are pessimistic about healing, and they convey that in one way or another to patients.

I had atrial fibrillation and ended up having a an ablation and the doctor was brilliant it was she was world's expert in atrial feb and but she read me the riot act of what was possibly going to happen to me when i had the procedure surgery done and i was like a half an hour of terrifying well you could die and we could puncture your aorta we could do this like you're this could rupture and i'm like well you know it wasn't exactly inspiring i collect i collect some of these stories mark you know that i put under the heading of uh you know this is uh medical hexing uh one i remember was i had a woman patient that had systemic lupus you know she was pretty sick and

she worked with the rheumatologist and she kept bugging the rheumatologist about what her prognosis was she must have really exasperated him and finally he said well put it this way i wouldn't buy any tires with a lifetime guarantee oh yeah yeah wow unbelievable or let me tell you one other i had a patient from finland the woman who had m and she came to ours. She stayed at Canyon Ranch and just imagine, first of all, the benefit of coming from Finland in the winter and staying at Canyon Ranch. So she brightened up and she said, you wouldn't believe what those doctors did to me in Finland. She said the head neurologist at the hospital, when he made the diagnosis, said, wait here. He went out and came in with a wheelchair and asked her to sit in the wheelchair. And he said he wanted her to get a

wheelchair and sit in it for an hour a day to practice for when she would need a wheelchair practice. That's terrible. Yeah. And I think, you know, I mean, you and I have seen great results. And I think part of it is because we do believe one, we believe ourselves in the power of the healing mechanisms, the body, and it's actually not really a belief anymore. There's so much science to back it up. Totally. And the patient then feels that possibility and then they actually engage with their health more and they start to believe it and it starts to shift everything. I think that's one of the most important things we can do for patients is to give them that

sense of confidence in their body's ability to handle things. Yeah. And, you know, I think the other thing is we're learning about is, you know, our thoughts influence everything, right? Our telomeres, our microbiome. Amazing. Literally those bacteria listening to your conversations just like alexa and they actually start to change and go different bugs or good bugs or bad bugs so

it's so important to get your mindset right and i think the mindset story is something that we don't tell enough in medicine we don't teach people how to navigate their thoughts and their feelings and none of us get any instruction in emotional intelligence. I mean, we learn, you know, reading, writing, arithmetic, but we don't learn the most important things in life, which is how to have healthy relationships, how to practice, how to create health for ourselves and how to manage our money. Well, all those are key, key components of healthy living. And absolutely, this should be, this should be taught. By the way, I think we should have

robust health education starting in kindergarten and going all the way up through professional education and beginning with the idea that the body can heal itself. Yeah. Well, you know more about how our car works or how our iPhone works than how our bodies work for most people. And I think one of the magnificent things you've done is you've taught people what the healing systems are in their body from both food and mind-body systems and exercise and many other modalities, the role of plants and herbs and nutrients in creating healing. And the truth is that most of health does not get created by the doctor. It's created by your lifestyle and the factors you have full control over and that are not that expensive. And sometimes you need some heroic measures like I did and you probably might have at some point in your life. But thank God for that. It's just not where the money is

right now in terms of how we focus on what's important. But diabetes is the greatest example. It's crippling our economy globally, obesity in America and obesity, diabetes costs, I think, 3.7 trillion in direct and indirect costs. That's an enormous amount of money. That's like a third of our economy, just that. I mean, sorry, a fifth of our economy, just that. And yet, it's curable by food and lifestyle and exercise and stress reduction and all those things. And we don't do anything about it. So, listen to this.

This is very, I think, sobering. A few years ago, the New York Times ran a week-long series on the effect of the diabetes epidemic in New York City on the city. And one article was an economic analysis of it. I read that. It's terrifying. Okay. For every clinic that offered nutritional counseling or preventive medical counseling, for each consult, they lost on average of $50 to $100. For every amputation of a diabetic limb, they made $6,000.

So, there's the problem right there. Prevention doesn't pay. And until we can figure out how to make it pay, we aren't getting anywhere. The whole system is corrupt. It is geared toward making money for interventions, for drugs. It is not geared toward incentivizing people to teach prevention. Yeah, I mean, I think it's starting, right? I mean, value-based care is a concept that says,

well, we need to get better outcomes at lower costs and you need to be accountable for the results. I mean, think about it. If you went to your car mechanic and you gave him your car, but he didn't fix it and charge you a lot of money, you wouldn't go back to him. Right. You know, right now we pay for healthcare, even though the results are abominable and our product disease are escalating and their costs are escalating, we're not seeing benefit, we should be paying for results. And that's really what the system is shifting towards, what Medicare is shifting towards.

The problem is doctors don't know how to produce those results because they just, you know, are trying to do the same things a little bit better and more efficiently. But for example, at Cleveland Clinic where I work where I work, they had an accountable care system where they were paid a certain fixed amount for diabetes care. So if they get, let's say, $20 million a year from Medicare to cover all their diabetic patients, if it costs them $10 million to take care of them, they make $10 million. If it costs them $30 million, they lose $10 million. So they're incentivized, but they still don't know what to do. They still don't understand that they should be providing food for the patients like they

did at Geisinger where they showed an 80% reduction in cost by giving the patients food as opposed to drugs. We'll pay for the drugs. We'll pay for insulin and all the medications and the amputations and the doctor visits and the bypasses, but we won't pay for a few dollars worth of food, which is insane. Right. Well, I'd love to see all this change. Yeah, I think it's coming.

I think it's coming. Hopefully, we'll get there. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about longevity because I know you wrote a book many years ago called Healthy Aging. Yeah. And that was honestly way before the rest of the world is waking up to these concepts that now are hitting the mainstream around longevity. And you've got all the tech billionaires really interested in this now and

putting billions of dollars into longevity research. You've got it being a recognized discipline in science now, or it was sort of a stepchild, but why should we study age and we all get old and we can't do anything about it? And I think the truth is we can't. And I just did my biological age test. It's a DNA methylation test. And I'm 62. I think I was 35 when I met you. I'm 62. And biologically, I'm 43.

Oh, great. So we have the capacity, if we know what to do, to regulate our aging process. And often what we see is abnormal aging. It's not actual, a necessary consequence of getting older. We all get older, but we don't have to age in the same way. So what have you learned for yourself personally, and also from the science about how we need to think about our longevity and actually turning the clock back? Okay. Well, first of all, I remain skeptical of life extension. I don't think we're going to be able to do much about extending the human lifespan. I think it's relatively fixed.

So, I would say rather we should focus on being healthy as we age. And the real problem, the real question is, is it necessary to get sick as you get older? We see that when people get past the age of 60, 65, a lot of them develop heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer. Is that inevitable? And I think it's not. I think it is possible to separate the aging process from age-related disease. So, then the goal is to live long and well and have a rapid drop-off at the end. So, you know, and there's a, the technical term for that is compression of morbidity. So, you're trying to squeeze the time of disability and decline at the end of life into a shorter period as possible. And I think you do

that by applying all of the methods that we know that, all the lifestyle methods that we know that influence health as you go through life, starting with diet, getting adequate rest and sleep, regular physical activity, attending to stress, all of these things that we know about. Absolutely. I think the work by Dan Buhner, as we mentioned earlier, has really helped us identify what are the default mechanisms in these cultures where they live to be 100. I mean, maybe we'd upper limit. It was 122 of the oldest person. But most of us potentially could get to 100 if we took away a lot of the insults. Right.

Now that we've dealt with infectious disease mostly, and we've dealt with sanitation, we've dealt with the vaccination diseases. And now we have the opportunity if we actually shift into a way of living that creates health to actually- Now, there are a lot of centenarians around these days. They used to be quite rare, but now there are a lot of them. But if you look at them, most of them are sick. Most of them are not doing that well. And that's not the goal. I mean, you don't want to just live to a high number. You want to live and be able to enjoy life and feel good. So, you know, that's the real challenge is how do you stay well as you get older? I think that's right. And I think, you know, I was in Sardinia last summer and I met this guy,

Pietro, who was 95 and just stopped his shepherding work at 95 and was hiking five miles every day up and down the mountains. He was bolt upright, booming voice, clear eyes. I'm like, wow, you're 95 years old. And he was sitting there chatting with his friends and had been eating their traditional diet for years and doing natural activities and built the community. And so all those were defaults. And we've lost all those defaults. We're all isolated and lonely. We eat crap food. We don't move our bodies. We're under chronic stress. There was a guy named Silvio I met in Sardinia. I said, Silvio, tell me, he was a shepherd and he was living on the top of this mountain. And I think his family had been there for thousands of years. And I said, Silvio, do you have any stress? And he kind of looked at me like I was kind of a little funny

question. And I said, you know, stress, like where things are difficult. Or he thought for a minute, he goes, well, sometimes at night when a goat gets out, I have to go get it. I'm like, oh, God, that's stress, right? Yeah. So I think we are just so inundated with so many insults. And it takes a kind of a heroic effort to redesign your life to actually create the conditions for having your health span equal your lifespan, which is what you're talking about. I mean, the average person in America, I think the last 17 years of their life are spent in poor health and disability.

So if you live to be 60, maybe your health span is 60, but the next 20 years, you have no health. And that's not good. Yeah. Now, when you look at some of these people that are old and doing well they're all over the map you can find some who smoke and drink moderately and yeah i i talked to one russian woman who was 103 i think and was asked about the secret of her longevity she said i never eat vegetables so it's true but you know i think one of the commonalities that i see is like very good social connections yes social intellectual connections as you go through

life i think in our culture an awful lot of older people become isolated that's probably gotten much worse during the pandemic uh but you know social isolation i think is is a great underminer of of health and healthy longevity. Yeah, and I think I might have read it in your books, but like if you belong to a bowling club or a knitting club or it doesn't matter what it is, that as long as you belong to something and have some connection and it actually creates some kind of downstream effects. And, you know, I think the science of this is fascinating. I don't know if you've dug into this whole research around socio genomics, which is the power of social connections to influence our immune system and our gene expression. And you know about the work of entrainment, right? Where you, I think I read you wrote about it, which is where if you're in a room with

someone, you're having a heart centered connection and you're both wired up to EKG and EEG, you can literally see the other person's heartbeat and the other person's brain, right? And so I think there's so much to this that we're just beginning to understand about the biology of these social connections. And it's not just an abstract idea. There's always a mechanism underneath it.

Absolutely. I saw research from Japan, which nobody here knows about, showing that laughter can actually turn off genes involved in prostate cancer. Wow. Amazing. I mean, talk about a mind-body interaction. I mean, that's laughter and genes.

It's powerful. Yeah. I mean, you knew Norman Cousins. Yes. And I think his book, The Anatomy of an Illness, also really influenced me when I was in my 20s. Yeah, same. And he had ankylosing spondylitis, which is an autoimmune disease, and decided he wasn't going to take the advice of his doctor, but he was going to watch Laurel and Hardy movies and the Marx Brothers. Yeah, he laughed his way to good health.

Yeah. Yeah, that was great. Absolutely. Yeah, it's so powerful. And for you, Andy, what are the things that you incorporate in your life now? I don't even know how old you are, because you look the same as you did when I met you 30 years ago. I'm going to be 80 in a couple months. No, amazing. God, you look mazel tov. You look fantastic. Thank you. So, you're obviously mind is bright, your skin is clear, your eyes are good. I mean, what are you doing day to day,

given all that you've learned in your lifetime and all the amazing access you've had to leading edge research and how to keep healthy? Okay, well, I follow my own dietary advice. You know, I eat an anti-inflammatory diet, varied, you know, all the things that I should be doing. I try to be physically active. I walk is my favorite physical activity. I have two big dogs that take me for walks. And I think being with companion animals is a healthy strategy. I like to laugh and I like to spend time with friends and cook. I really attend to good rest and sleep i do my breathing exercises um i keep engaged in the world and my teaching is certainly provides that yeah i can't imagine retiring i mean that's just not not of interest to me yeah i think that's so key i think the you know you look at the data on

retirement it actually is a death sentence i mean i think yeah i mean i'm sure you've seen that too within six months of retiring many men you know get know, get really sick or die. Yeah. So are there any, are there any things that you do that are a little bit extra? Like I, you've written a lot about supplements and nutritional deficiencies and you know, you've recommended a lot of supplements over the years. Where are you at with that now? And what do you think, what is your thoughts about what you should be taking? You know, I take vitamin D, I take Co coq10 i take an antioxidant mix uh i take some extra magnesium i use a variety of mushroom supplements which i think are really good for immune health um i think that's you know i think that's basically what it yeah and and you know you

you know there's a lot of uh work you've done in the world of mushrooms. You've been very into mushrooms. And we're entering a mushroom renaissance here. Quite amazing. I mean, so many friends are starting companies with mushrooms. I have a friend who started a company called Hero Diapers or Hero Technologies, which is essentially using mycelial technology to digest the diaper and the poop. How great. And it actually can eat all the plastic and the poop. How great. How great.

And it actually can eat all the plastic and landfills. How great. It's amazing. Amazing. And now there's a whole field of psychedelic-assisted therapies and for trauma and depression and end-of-life therapy. It's quite amazing to see Paul Stamets, I know you're close with, is now getting a lot of attention, is creating these microdosing stacks. And how do you see that sort of emerging research around

mushrooms and both therapeutic mushrooms, adaptogenic mushrooms, and also psychedelic mushrooms? And I want to draw on your ethnobotany background to kind of give us a deep dive into this. Well, I got interested in the therapeutic benefits of mushrooms a long time ago, and I was one of the first people to write about them and try to get people to do research on them. And I first came onto this from looking at traditional Chinese medicine, where mushrooms are highly esteemed as remedies, and there'd been almost no research in the West on them. So I think, especially for immune modulation, for increasing resistance to viral infections, cancer, there's a lot there. You know, that's a big area of research. The psychedelic

mushrooms, this is part of the whole psychedelic renaissance that's happening now. It's long overdue, and I think it's a good thing. And it may be that, you know, maybe this is the one thing that can save our culture. Frankly, I think we're in so much trouble. And, you know, it may be that this is the consciousness change that can happen. It's possible. In some ways, I can't believe how it is penetrating mainstream culture. I saw an article, listen to this, this was at a month ago in Town and Country magazine. Yeah.

Of all things, Town and Country magazine titled, Why is Everyone Smoking Toad Venom? Yeah. In Town and Country? Wow. I mean, unbelievable. And Vogue had a cover story on psilocybin a few months ago. I mean, this is really out there now.

And when I was traveling before the pandemic didn't matter what subject i was talking on healthy aging and inflammatory diet integrated medicine i would get questions about psychedelics you know this people are curious they want to know they want access to it it's happening i i think it's a good thing and and how do you how do you think that um you know this this this movement is going to end up? I mean, you think we're going to legalize it? Do you think it's going to be part of our traditional medical therapies for chronic conditions?

I mean- Yeah, I think we're going to see, first of all, I think MDMA will be made available for post-traumatic stress disorder, psilocybin for drug-resistant depression, a few other things like this. I think there will be more and more people trained in how to use psychedelic therapy. So that's one movement that's going to happen. The other is, I think, just penetration of the general culture that people are going to be microdosing and experimenting. So I don't know exactly how it's going to play out and i have some worries about you know our big company is going to try to take it over and control it i don't know we'll see

yeah there's like a lot of public companies that are now a lot investing in psychedelic research mushroom technologies you know i i think paul paul sammits i heard him speak recently and he talked about his work he's doing around dimension alzheimer's using microdosing and using a stack of lion's mane and psilocybin and niacin and and it's fascinating research to show that really impact on these neurodegenerative diseases how do you think that's working i don't think we know enough yet i don't think we have enough data there's not but but it's promising it's a promising area of research so i think we should follow it and see what happens. And you said something very provocative, which is if basically if all Americans took mushrooms, that magic mushrooms, that everything would shift. Why do you say that? And what does it do to the brain?

And how does it change our perceptions in ways that shift things toward a more tolerant world? of experiential evidence of people having very radical shifts in how they perceive the world and their relationship to it as a result of psychedelic experiences. And I think some people become very aware of the environmental crisis and how their behavior influences it or their connection with nature, connection with other people. You know, we need a change in consciousness if we're going to avoid disaster. You know, things seem to be heading in a very bad direction on all fronts. And I think the only thing that can avert it is a change in consciousness. And the only agents that I see out there that have the potential to do that are psychedelics, not just mushrooms.

Yeah, it's really true. And I think it got such a bad rap uh but it was really a key part of psychiatric research back in the 50s and michael pollan did a great job and how to change your mind about mapping out you know how that's all unfolded and why we got so sidetracked and now it's all coming back and i you know i don't know about you but i i i would say the experiences i had in college and i now i think it's okay to talk about it. Yeah, sure. Most people would not say anything about it. But you know, I definitely had the experience of it. This was in the 70s and it was a thing. And I remember always doing it in a sort of a sacred container of nature with friends, not just going to parties and taking a bunch of drugs, but actually having a very intentional

experience. And it really profoundly affected the way I saw the world, the way I saw myself, what mattered to me, understanding the intersection and connectivity between things. I think you and I are very similar in that way. We see the patterns in the data. We see the way things are connected. We see that of the ecological view. You're an ecological doctor. I think that's really what we're doing is ecological medicine.

Yeah. And I think that hugely influenced me and started to shift my thinking towards more of this kind of medicine. Was that something that happened to you? I know you went to South America. You had all these experiences. Yeah, but I did. I began experimenting with psychedelics when I was in college long ago.

That was a Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert era, right? Yeah, right. But yes, I think a profound influence on my way of thinking and my way of thinking about medicine. And what happened? What were some of the experiences that you had? Well, I think some of it was really seeing very graphically how what was inside my head was connected with what was outside my head and that I could change things out there by changing things in here.

Yeah, it's so powerful. And then there's a whole other class, I think, that are now also mushrooms that are arising that are therapeutic mushrooms that we really haven't taken advantage of. That I've been using a lot more personally, that I'm using my patients with. It's cordyceps, reishi, maitake, shiitake, lion's mane. Yeah. All these incredible mushrooms. But these have been long used in Asian medicine and Japanese medicine, Chinese medicine, Korean medicine.

And they've been extremelyorean medicine and they've been extremely valued and they've been unknown in our part of the world until recently yeah so i think they're good to incorporate into the diet the edible ones and to consider taking as supplements it's true i actually eat a lot of mushrooms i eat you know shiitake and maitake mushrooms you know you can buy a whole variety of mushrooms, not those little white button mushrooms. Yeah, that's the only thing we had available for years. And now suddenly we have all these new mushrooms available. Yeah.

And the science behind them is quite impressive. You know, lion's mane helps the brain heal. Yeah, there's a very, very robust body of research accumulating now on these mushrooms. They were ignored for so long do you take any of the supplemental mushrooms i do powders or i i take capsules of uh mostly capsules of uh lion's mane cordyceps yeah yeah i i i actually make a smoothie in the morning and i have the powders and i just mix all the different mushrooms in my smoothie and i don't really notice that it's fine great but some of them taste great too you know as you know my talkie she talkie these are delicious uh edible mushrooms

and there's companies like uh four sigmatic that now you can make mushroom teas and a lot of companies are emerging that are are making this stuff really quite accessible a good so uh what's your what's your what's your what's your dreams and goals for yourself for the next 30, 40 years? Well, that's extremely optimistic. I want to see the field of integrative medicine get on a very solid footing. I've always said one day we'll be able to drop the word integrative. It just be good medicine. And maybe that's not that far away.

I'd be very happy to see that. Yeah, I think that's great. And I think, you know, you are such an important figure in healthcare. And unfortunately, you know, it takes so many decades for things to change. And you've just been at this for, gosh, now five decades. I feel lucky that I've been able to see these changes in my lifetime because I think a lot of people, you know, don't get to live to see the effects of their work and you know I do so it makes me very happy yeah it's great and I and again I said yeah you you influenced me so deeply and helped me get on this path and helped me realize there was a path yeah and and you were sort of catalytic and you know sort of following your footsteps at Kenya Ranch felt really awesome for me. And it was just, it was just so beautiful, um, to actually have that support of your perspective

as a foundation for, for stepping out of the traditional sort of format of healthcare. And I don't, thanks for telling me that. Yeah. I don't think, I don't think I'd be Dr. Mark Hyman if I wasn't, wasn't for you. Well, Andy, thank you so much for all of your work, for your whole lifetime of dedication and persistence. And I know you're not stopping. You're still going. You're still working and still teaching us things and helping us to see that there is a way to think differently about our health from the perspective of activating our own

body's healing system. That was probably one of the most important insights I ever had as a doctor which is we have a healing system really what it's not just about drugs and surgery and so thank you so much andy for being i enjoy talking with you good and uh i look forward to what's coming next for you and and of course everybody who listens podcast share with your friends and family on social media, subscribe to your podcast and follow, go follow Andy, go to drweil.com, follow him on Instagram at Dr. Weill. Check out his books.

I mean, I Love Spontaneous Healing, Eight Weeks to Optimal Health. I mean, those are my favorites, Healthy Aging, and there's many, many more. And of course, Chocolate to Morphine was really way ahead of its time which was i think your first part no natural mind was my first natural mind okay okay but it was all about the psychoactive components in our food and medicines and mushrooms so thank you andy for being the visionary that's helped us all uh following your footsteps and uh we'll see you next week on the doctor's pharmacy hey everybody it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy.

I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff

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forward slash PICS to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash PICS, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter. And I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a

substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioneritioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.