Why Our Health Matters, an important book by Weil, MD and his CALL FOR ACTION

Dr. Weil's book,  Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future, was just released this month and it was on my reading list. Sometimes I just have to ditch the reading list. When the call to read it comes, ride the energy. I just gulped in 3 days, including taking notes.

Weil breaks the book down into digestible pieces of  (1) how our health care system (he calls it our sick care system) got to the crisis it is today then to (2) where we need to be and (3) how to get there. It's an eye opening book with constant reminders of how we must trust our body's innate healing capacity and rely less on new technologies and medication to quick fix our symptoms and get to the root of our issues. More importantly though is to take preventative self care which requires looking at our lifestyle, nutrition, and environment to maintain our health, before illness sets in.

Why Our Health Matters addresses a complex issue of our health care crisis and what we can do as individuals. It's an important book to me as I further develop my training as an Ayurvedic practitioner. Developing an awereness of our problems and needs and when to integrate "whole-person" medicine and "western" medical technologies, where it does have its place too.

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Excerpted from Chapter 5 Doctors of the Future
"The doctors of tomorrow will have to be different from most of those today..... "In the years to come we will want more of our doctors to rely on the human body's ability to heal. I believe this change will happen naturally as our present system of disease management diintegrates under the weight of self-destructive expense and the reality of poor outcomes."

"The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in teh care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease." Edison went on to say, 'There were never so many able, active minds at work on the problems of diseases as now, and all their discoveries are tending to the simple truth that you can't improve on nature.'

"The wisdom of Edison, one of the fathers of the age of technology, holds true today and should guide us to the future. Tomorrow's aspects of a physician's professional life: his or her personal qualities, education, training, philosophy of treatment, and way of interacting with the community..... The doctor exemplifies and models health and health promoting behavior."