[5] He graduated from high school in 1959, and was awarded a scholarship from the American Association for the United Nations,[4] giving him the opportunity to go abroad for a year, during which he lived with families in India, Thailand, and Greece.
He began hearing that mescaline enhanced creativity and produced visionary experiences, and finding little information on the subject, he read The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.[when?
[7]: 145f Weil is reported to have experienced opposition to this line of inquiry at the NIMH, to have departed to his rural northern Virginia home (1971-1972), and to have begun his practices of vegetarianism, yoga, and meditation, and work on writing The Natural Mind (1972).
[18][19] At the same time, Weil began an affiliation with the Harvard Botanical Museum that would span from 1971 to 1984, where his work included duties as a research associate investigating "the properties of medicinal and psychoactive plants".
[32] In an interview on Larry King Live, Weil focused on a view that sugar, starch, refined carbohydrates, and trans-fats are more dangerous to the human body than saturated fats.
[35] While Weil's early books and publications primarily explored altered states of consciousness,[citation needed] he has since expanded the scope of his work to encompass healthy lifestyles and health care in general.
[37][better source needed] Published collections of answers to questions received on his DrWeil.com website: In addition to the foregoing individual paperback, hardback, audio, and electronic versions, various combined and compendia editions have appeared.
[42] More recently, Weil has written the forewords to a variety of books, including Paul Stamets's Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World[43] and Lewis Mehl-Madrona's Coyote Medicine.
[46] The late Barry Beyerstein of Simon Fraser University, writing in the journal Academic Medicine in 2001, criticized Weil and various aspects of complementary and alternative medicine, asserting that it held a "magical world-view"; he continued, saying, On advocating emotional criteria for truth over criteria based on empirical data and logic, New Age medical gurus such as Andrew Weil ... have convinced many that "anything goes" ... By denigrating science, these detractors have enlarged the potential following for magical and pseudoscientific health products.
[47]In 2003, Steven Knope, author of The Body/Mind Connection (2000),[full citation needed] a physician trained at Weill Cornell Medical College, and former Chair of the Department of Medicine in the Tucson, Arizona, Carondelet system, criticized Weil in a televised discussion for what he considered irresponsible advocacy of untested treatments.
[48] Simon Singh, a recognized British science writer, and Edzard Ernst, a former Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter, echoed Beyerstein's criticism in their 2008 book Trick or Treatment, saying that although Weil correctly promotes exercise and smoke-free lifestyles "much of his advice is nonsense.
"[49] Hans Baer of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Arkansas, writing in 2003, has argued that Weil's approach represents a general limitation of the holistic health/New Age movement, in its "tendenc[y] to downplay the role of social, structural, and environmental factors in the etiology of disease" in the United States, and in doing so, represents a failure to "suggest substantive remedies for improving access to health care", generally, for the "millions of people who lack any type of health insurance"; at the same time, Baer notes (with negative connotations) that Weil instead contributes "to a long tradition of entrepreneurialism in the U.S. medical system.
[52] Weil has also been accused by others in the alternative health movement of being involved in the "dishonest practice of spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about competitors' products, while pretending to be [an] objective 3rd [party].
"[53][better source needed] Weil's 1983 Chocolate to Morphine roused the ire of Florida senator Paula Hawkins, "who demanded that the book, a veritable encyclopaedia of various drugs and their effects on humans, be removed from schools and libraries.
"[55][better source needed] The FDA was primarily concerned with several implicit claims in Weil Lifestyle LLC's marketing literature, that certain products could help ward off such viruses.
[17][57] His "Ask Dr. Weil" website was chosen by Forbes' Best of the Web Directory in 2009 for having offered "straightforward tips and advice on achieving wellness through natural means and educating the public on alternative therapies.