Andrew Weil Quotes

I saw many people who had advanced heart disease and I was so frustrated because I knew if they just knew how to do the right thing, simple lifestyle and diet steps, that the entire trajectory of their life and health would have been different.

As many citizens can attest, the U.S. is a great place to get sick, but a terrible place to stay well. This requires a shift in the way both doctors and patients approach health maintenance and disease prevention.

Eastern medicine is not about curing your sickness. It's about keeping you well.

I want doctors to treat toward health and not treat toward disease.

You can't afford to get sick, and you can't depend on the present health care system to keep you well. It's up to you to protect and maintain your body's innate capacity for health and healing by making the right choices in how you live.

I am not against all forms of high-tech medicine. Drugs and surgeries have a secure place in the treatment of serious health conditions. But modern American medicine treats almost every health condition as if it were an emergency.

The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.

Health has its science as well as disease

Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought, Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught, The wise, for cure, on exercise depend; God never made his work for man to mend.

I think integrative medicine, something I've pioneered, is the way of the future. Its great promise is that it can reduce healthcare costs by shifting the whole focus of healthcare away from disease management to health promotion and prevention. They can do that two ways: first, by focusing attention on lifestyle medicine, which is very deficient. And second, by bringing into the mainstream treatments that are lower cost because they are not dependent on expensive technology.

I've always wanted to be in the health and wellness business. I try to encourage people to live a healthy lifestyle.

Hospitals are great places, and you can learn from them, but you don't necessarily need to go in anytime you get the sniffles. And maybe you shouldn't treat pregnancy as a disease.

I appreciate health care that gets to the root cause of our symptoms and promotes wellness, rather than the one-size-fits-all drug-based approach to treating disease. I love maintaining an optimal quality of life - naturally.

There is simply not enough money available to support a system in which the lion's share of expenditures is devoted to acute care, with virtually nothing being spent on preventive medicine, i.e. health care.

I don't work on longevity, I work on keeping people healthy.

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

Prevention is one of the few known ways to reduce demand for health and aged care services.

Our health care system is terribly broken… Health comes from much more than health care and health care is much more than hospitals. We do a good job on treatment and a terrible job on prevention.

[Public Health] means the saving and lengthening of lives of thousands of citizens, the extension of the vigorous working period well into old age, and the prevention of inefficiency, misery, and suffering. These advances can be made by organized social effort. Public health is purchasable.

I think the problem with the country is that we operate on a sickness model, not a wellness model... Basically, we treat people who become ill. What we don't do is do a very good job in keeping them healthy in the first place...

Concepts such as 'risk factor modification' and 'prevention' are often considered boring and they may not initiate or sustain the levels of motivation needed to make and maintain comprehensive lifestyle changes.

I think that that's the wisest thing - to prevent illness before we try to cure something.

Our bodies are truly the result of what we eat, what we think about, and the exercise we receive. If we are not wise, these little things can soon cause major health problems that will limit our success and ability to serve.

The traditional way that society looks at healthcare is to let people get terribly sick and then have an emergency room to take care of them and spend a lot of money on acute care for people who would have been kept out of hospital in the first place if they had had a lifestyle change.

I was really inspired by lots of people I came across who were managing various illnesses through diet and lifestyle. I kind of figured, you know, if it worked for them, then I might as well try it and see if it works. So I did.