Discover the Best Books Written by Andrew Weil

Andrew Thomas Weil is an American celebrity doctor who advocates for alternative medicine, including the 4-7-8 breathing technique. Andrew Thomas Weil was born in Philadelphia on June 8, 1942, the only child of parents who operated a millinery store in a Reform Jewish family. He graduated from high school in 1959 and was awarded a scholarship from the American Association for the United Nations, giving him the opportunity to go abroad for a year, living with families in India, Thailand, and Greece.

From this experience, he became convinced that, in many ways, American culture and science were insular and unaware of non-American practices. 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. Weil entered Harvard University in 1960, majoring in biology with a concentration in ethnobotany. 

He had an early curiosity regarding psychoactive drugs, and in that period, he met Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert and separately engaged in organized experimentation with mescaline. Weil would write for and eventually serve as an editor of the Harvard Crimson. One published account of the period describes a falling out of Weil from the group that included the faculty—among whom the experimentation with drugs was contentious and, with regard to undergraduates, proscribed; the falling out involved an exposé on drug use and supply that Weil wrote for the Crimson. 

Weil's undergraduate thesis was titled "The Use of Nutmeg as a Psychotropic Agent," specifically on the narcotic properties of nutmeg, inspired by a class with David McClelland, chair of the Department of Social Relations and a former director of Harvard's Center for Research in Personality. In 1964, he graduated cum laude with a B.A. in biology.

Weil entered Harvard Medical School "not with the intention of becoming a physician but rather simply to obtain a medical education." He received a medical degree in 1968, although "the Harvard faculty ... threatened to withhold it because of a controversial marijuana study Weil had helped conduct" in his final year. Weil moved to San Francisco and completed a one-year medical internship at Mount Zion Hospital in 1968–69. While there, he volunteered at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.[citation needed] Weil completed one year of a two-year program at NIH, resigning due to "official opposition to his work with marijuana."

Following his internship, Weil took a position with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) that lasted approximately one year to pursue his interests in research on marijuana and other drugs; during this time, he may have received formal institutional permission to acquire marijuana for the research.

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). 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." His interests led him to explore the healing systems of indigenous people. With this aim, Weil traveled throughout South America and other parts of the world, "collecting information about medicinal plants and healing," from 1971 to 1975 as a fellow for the Institute of Current World Affairs.

In 1994, Weil founded the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, Arizona, where he serves as its director. Andrew Weil is the founder of True Food Kitchen, a restaurant chain serving meals on the premise that food should make you feel better. There are currently 32 restaurants in the chain.