[Alex3917]

Caffeine can decrease anxiety? That's highly contradictory to a bulk of medical wisdom out there.

"Medicinal plants contain a wide array of chemical compounds. At first, this looks like chaos, but more investigation reveals a distinct order. Natural selection pressures push a plant to "try out" variations on molecules to enhance the plant's odds of surviving stressful environments. So, often, one molecule is present in the greatest amount and has the most dramatic effect in a human body -- but along with it are variations of that molecule in the same plant.

For example, for several years, I did ethnobotanical study in South America, researching native uses for coca leaf, which most of us know only as the source of the isolated, problematic, addictive drug cocaine. For Andean Indians, whole coca leaf is the number one medicinal plant. They use it to treat gastrointestinal disturbances; specifically, for both diarrhea and constipation. From the perspective of Western pharmacology, this makes no sense. Cocaine stimulates the gut, it increases bowel activity, so obviously it would be a good treatment for constipation, but what could it do for diarrhea except make it worse?

However, if you look carefully at the coca leaf's molecular array, you find 14 bioactive alkaloids, with cocaine in the greatest amount. While cocaine acts as a gut stimulant, other coca alkaloids can have precisely the opposite action, they inhibit gut activity.

This means that when you take the whole mixture into the body, the potential is there for the action to go in either direction. What decides it? The state of the body, which is a function of which receptors in the gut's tissues are available for binding. During my time in Andean Indian communities, I collected many reports about whole coca's paradoxical, normalizing effect on bowel function, and experienced it firsthand, as well."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/why-plants-are-...

[mhd]

Andrew Weil isn't exactly regarded as the most credible source in medical circles. (And I'm being kind here. I've heard some comparisons to Deepak Chopra…)

[Alex3917]

He's pretty up on his science. Don't forget he graduated from Harvard medical school, was editor of the Crimson, and majored in botany as an undergrad, making him probably vastly smarter and more knowledgeable about science than anyone here on HN. I actually saw him give a talk this year where he talked about how LSD cured his cat allergies: http://www.maps.org/videos/source/video6.html

He speculates about a lot of stuff like this that sounds pretty crazy unless you're willing to take the time to understand his argument. Obviously these kinds of musings are unproven, but that is by definition the nature of speculation. And his actual medical advice is all pretty solid from what I've seen. My favorite talk by him is this:

http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=129

Again there is a lot of speculation, but there's nothing wrong with that at least in my book.

[nollidge]

> vastly smarter and more knowledgeable about science than anyone here on HN

Perhaps, but that's probably why the GP talked about his reputation "in medical circles". He's not any more knowledgeable about science than his major critics:

http://www.quackwatch.com/11Ind/weil.html

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/06/science_is_irrelev...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=4431

http://scientopia.org/blogs/whitecoatunderground/2009/10/18/...

[Alex3917]

The quackwatch article you cite is extremely intellectually dishonest. It makes a couple points which would be interesting if true, but the overwhelming about of BS makes me highly skeptical. The author seems to have a complete inability to just point out any errors Weil has made and explain why they are wrong. Instead we get sentences like:

"The leaders of the establishment believe in the scientific method, and in the rule of evidence, and in the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology upon which the modern view of nature is based. Alternative practitioners either do not seem to care about science or explicitly reject its premises."

Not only is this intellectually dishonest because it has nothing to do with what Weil has actually written, but it isn't even true; it was homeopathy that invented evidence-based medicine and drug testing in the first place.

[nollidge]

> homeopathy that invented evidence-based medicine and drug testing

I'll need a citation for that. Homeopathy is one of the most blatantly nonsensical, improbable, and unproven "disciplines" I've ever come across.

Edit: For context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy

[Alex3917]

From a JAMA book review:

"19th-century homeopaths pioneered systematic drug-testing research, challenged the dangerously depleting procedures of mainstream physicians at that time, established rigorous professional standards, and valued advanced education at least as highly as their mainstream counterparts did. It was not without reason that homeopaths considered the bases of their approach to medical problems to be more logical and more promising than the inherited tradition of the ancients, upon which mainstream physicians still based their practices."

(For what it's worth, JAMA highly recommends the book.)

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/295/13/1590.extract

[nollidge]

(Thanks for the homeopathy citation. I'll have to check that out.)

> The author seems to have a complete inability to just point out any errors Weil has made

Are we reading the same thing? The quote you cited was from the fifth paragraph of the 18-paragraph first section of a five-section piece which contains countless references to Weil's own words. Admittedly I have not read the whole thing yet myself, but I would hope you could reserve judgment on the intellectual honesty of the essay after reading somewhat past the introductory portion.

[Alex3917]

I skimmed through the whole article and found all sorts of problems. For example:

"Weil's writings are ambiguous about the conflict between science and alternative medicine, as they are about many other issues in alternative medicine."

What conflict between science and alternative medicine? How is his writing ambiguous? How is this a problem? How is his writing ambiguous about other issues in alternative medicine?

"[weil] thinks that all healing methods ought to be tested; and yes, modern science can make useful contributions to our understanding of health and disease. Yet the scientific method is not, for Weil, the only way, or even the best way, to learn about nature and the human body."

What does Weil actually get wrong? Is there actually some error in either his epistemology or what he is advocating?

"Many important truths are intuitively evident and do not need scientific support, even when they seem to contradict logic."

Where does he actually say this? What's the context? There isn't even any inherent problem with this statement, so it doesn't make any sense to criticize him for it unless you're going to actually go out and find something wrong.

"Weil is not bothered by logical contradictions in his argument, or encumbered by a need to search for objective evidence."

What logical contradictions?

The typical Redditor could write exactly the same article without even reading any of Weil's books. And it really only gets worse from there, e.g.

"According to Weil, many of his basic insights about the causes of disease and the nature of healing come from what he calls 'stoned thinking'"

Again he can't find any actual problem with what Weil is saying, so he's just poisoning the well.

He does eventually make a couple of points that appear to be solid, but there is so much other crap in there that it's hard to take seriously. If there are cases where Weil is wrong then by all means he should be called out on it, but this article is just nonsense.

[wanderr]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!