Dr. Andrew Weil On Health & Illness

“Freedom from disease” is a common dictionary definition of health. Dr. Andrew Weil, a medical doctor who had a profound experience on alternative medicine, has a more interesting concept of health. Health for the good doctor is more than the absence of hea th.

Dr. Weil shares his 10 insightful principles on health and sickness in his book “Health and Healing” (Houghton Mifflin,1995) :

1. Perfect Health is Not Attainable

Everyone gets sick. Our body is subject to change and periods of breakdown and “relative illness” is temporary. The other side of this principle is that illness should not be static either. Health is an alternations of ups and downs, a perfect normal changes human beings go through as their minds adapt to the changing stresses of daily life.

2. It is All Right to be Sick

Dr. Weil sees sickness to be the next period to health. One should not regard sickness as something that should not happen. Although sickness is undesired, the patient should work with all effort and intelligence toward reducing it’s severity and duration. Anger and guilt about falling sick not only go together with impossible dreams about attaining perfect health, they also interfere with the body’s innate ability to heal.

3. The Body has Innate Healing Abilities

Healing is an innate capacity of every person. You are born with the power to heal. Healing comes from inside, not outside. it is simply the body’s natural attempt to restore balance when balance is lost.

4. Agents of Disease are not Causes of Disease

Agents of disease in the form of viruses, bacteria, allergen, carcenogenic chemicals, etc., are always all around us. But not everyone exposed to these agents gets sick. In some individuals it fails to develop, either it is checked by the immune system or other reasons we may not understand. With the natural fluctuations of our cycles of relative health, these agents are merely potential vectors of illness waiting to strike and find fertile ground in which to develop especially at low periods of resistance.

5. All Illness is Psychosomatic

Dr. Weil believes all illness has both physical and mental components. Psychological factors that influence physiological processes. this principle states that mind and body completely penetrate one another.

6. Subtle Manifestations of Illness precede Gross Ones

Don’t wait until an illness gets serious. Give early attention when you discover you have a medical problem. Failure to notice and recognize at an early stage, the more dependent you get and the more costly of modern hospital medicine.

7. Every Body Is Different

People have individual differences. Not only in their faces and fingerprints but also people are biochemically unique. In terms of treatments, what is best for one might not be the best for another even if their problem appear similar.

8. Every Body has a Weak Point

Practice and learn to recognize your weak points as those signals will help you notice illness in it’s early stages and improve your chances of correcting it by simple measures.

9. Blood is a Principal Carrier of Healing Energy

Blood is important as a physical carrier of healing energy.One of the most effective ways to promote healing, is to increase the amount of blood supply to the ailing part of the body.

10. Proper Breathing is a Key to Good Health

“Proper breathing” means full, deep expansion of the lungs that nourishes the central nervous system and other bodily rhythms. Improper breathing increases susceptibility to agents of disease and a common cause of ill health.