Thom Hartmann: And our next guest, one of my personal heroes, Dr. Andrew Weil. The first book of yours, Dr. Weil, that I read was “From Chocolate to Morphine”.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Ah, that’s a long time ago, it’s still in print, and I’m going to do a revised edition soon.

Thom Hartmann: It was a fascinating book. The psychoactive properties of foods, basically. And over the years I’ve followed your work, and over the years I’ve been a health food junkie.

Dr. Andrew Weil: That's great.

Thom Hartmann: And back in 1978 my wife and I started the New England Salem Children's Village which continues to this day, which was a vegetarian diet-based, natural-foods-based, programme for kids who have are diagnosed with severe, well, they were, you know, kind of the edge of the line kids, the end of the line kids. Severely emotionally disturbed, and abused kids, and it’s worked wonderfully.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Delighted to hear that.

Thom Hartmann: But there’s a lot, and we relied heavily on your work for that.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Great.

Thom Hartmann: And so, I’m pleased to have you with us. His website, by the way, Dr. Andrew Weil, for those of you who are not familiar with him, is drweil.com. And one of the real pioneers and the face for many, many years of progressive medicine, integrative medicine it’s called nowadays, it used to be called alternative medicine. Columnist for "Prevention" and “TIME” magazines, is the author of ten best-selling books, drweil.com his website.

Dr. Weil, you wrote an article recently in which you asserted that you’re a conservative on medicine, and I thought it was brilliant on a couple of different levels. I’ve been for a long time on this radio programme, which is unabashedly, not partisan, not party-partisan, but liberal, progressive. I have been calling for Republicans to take back their party. My father was a Conservative, and died a Conservative, and a Republican, and somewhere between an Eisenhower and a Goldwater Conservative. And he was horrified by much of is being called Conservative these days.

And the point that you make in your book, or in your article, I thought was a point that really should be made on every single television programme that has one of those phoney Conservatives on, and I’d like you to go through the logic train in that with us.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Sure. You know the kind of medicine that I teach, called integrative medicine, is now really becoming mainstream, and it’s not alternative medicine. At the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, I and my colleagues are training physicians, medical residents, nurse practitioners and others to know when and when not to use this high-tech expensive conventional medicine, that we’re now using for everything and which is the main reason that our healthcare costs are so high.

There are whole areas of very relevant to health and treatment like nutrition, mind-body interactions, lifestyle health choices are simply not taught. And I think this is basically Conservative because we’re trying to return medicine to its roots.

You know, throughout history, good physicians have understood that healing is rooted in nature, that most disease is self-limited, that the body has an array of its own mechanisms to promote healing, we I think are, so we’re medically Conservative, advocating that the least treatment is the best. You know, the least expensive, the least invasive treatment, as demanded by the circumstances of illness. And I think we’re fiscally Conservative because we’re trying to lower healthcare costs by bringing lower-cost treatments into the mainstream.

Thom Hartmann: And none of that, by the way, Dr. Weil’s most recent book, “Why Our Health Matters”, let me get that in there because I just, I find your writings to be so valuable. None of that, Dr. Andrew Weil, is at the core of our current healthcare system. We have, on the one hand, patients who are being inundated by a marketing machine that says "This is what it looks like inside your veins, when it’s all, look at all those things clogging up, oh my God, you'd better get some Zoloft, or Valcor, or whatever", name it, I’m naming the wrong drugs here, but you know what I’m talking about, and "Lipitor, get some Lipitor tomorrow".

And then on the other side, you've got hospitals and in some cases, even groups of doctors as, the “New Yorker” article, you're probably familiar with.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Sure.

Thom Hartmann: Pointed out where there’s a group of doctors down in Texas who got together and as investors, invested in an imaging lab and x-ray machines of their own, you know, this, that, and the other thing, and then started referring their patients to it, and gee, all of a sudden, their patients were getting twice as many procedures as they used to have, and these doctors were making a whole lot more money than they used to, and the cost of medicine in that town went from seven thousand dollars a person, up to fourteen, if my memory of that article is correct.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Right, right.

Thom Hartmann: And so you’ve got on the delivery side, we’ve got a dysfunctional, for-profit system that encourages let’s call it anti-Conservative, cause I don’t want to call it Liberal. I like the word Liberal. Let’s call it destructive medicine, or at least stupid medicine, and in the middle we’ve got money changers who don’t prescribe a single drug, don’t take anybody’s temperature, don’t show up in the middle of the night when your kid is spiking a fever of 105, they do nothing.

They do absolutely nothing, except take the money from you and me as patients, and you’re one of the docs too, and hand it to you as a doc, and say, "oh, and by the way, we’re going to skim thirty percent off the top for doing that, and we’re going to pay Stephen Hemsley who’s the head of, the CEO of United Health Care, we’re going to pay him seven hundred and seventy million dollars for the last five years, and we’re going to pay his predecessor Bill McGuire one point eight seven billion dollars, cause you know, handling that money is really hard work." This is screwed up.

Dr. Andrew Weil: It certainly is, and if we don’t do something about it, it’s going to sink us. We pay more for health care than any people in the world. I mean, we have less to show for it. And the problem is, I don’t think we can look to politicians to change anything, because they are too beholden to these big investment interests who don’t want change. I think that it’s up to people to get informed about these issues and to demand the kind of changes that we need. For example, I would immediately ban direct to consumer advertising of pharmaceutical drugs.

Thom Hartmann: Amen. Used to be banned.

Dr. Andrew Weil: The only other that allows it is New Zealand.

Thom Hartmann: Used to be banned. I mean, they dropped that ban, when? I didn’t notice. I just all of a sudden noticed these ads.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Yes, it’s fairly recent.

Thom Hartmann: Ten or fifteen years ago.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Yes. And it’s been a disaster for medical practice, a huge boom for the drug companies. We should stop it right away.

Thom Hartmann: Yes. I can’t imagine any doctor sitting in their office and having a patient coming in and saying “I think I need somestuff“ and the doctor thinks “Oh no, here comes another one.”

Dr. Andrew Weil: It’s terrible. And the pharmaceutical lobby for all these years, imagine this, has blocked any legislation that would allow the Federal government to buy prescription drugs for Medicare on a discount.

Thom Hartmann: Right. To negotiate prices.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Unbelievable.

Thom Hartmann: Actually, the government does negotiate prices on prescription drugs and in many cases they get discounts of as much as seventy, eighty, ninety percent, because they’re buying millions at a time. But the only division of the US government that is allowed to do that is the Department of Defense, for the Veterans Administration and for active duty military, and Tricare.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Yep. Yep. So we got a big problem, and I don’t, you know, the debate at the moment is just missing the point. It’s all about how to give more people access to this system, and how…

Thom Hartmann: The system itself is broken.

Dr. Andrew Weil: The system is broken.

Thom Hartmann: So, it seems to me that a pretty straightforward way to solve this problem, and I was the keynote speaker at the Physicians for a National Health Plan back about eight years ago, and there was a book that I wrote on a topic related to this, and they’ve been right out at the front of it. Several good friends of mine are members of that organization, and docs, and they’ve been talking about this for decades. It seems that a very straightforward way to do this is to let or require everybody in the United States to buy into Medicare, and make it completely transparent, and allow it to completely negotiate with everybody, period. And now, it’s accountable to we the people, if we don’t like the way it’s running, we can give our elected officials hell. If I try to go and give Stephen Hemsley of United Health Care hell, he will have me arrested, for trespassing. But I can stand up in front of, you know, Congressmen, you know, Senator Jeff Merkley's office or Ron Wyden's office all day long, with this sign saying, you know, “Hey cretin, change the healthcare”, and that’s my right. It’s protected by the first amendment.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Yes.

Thom Hartmann: So, it seems to me that a national, single-payer healthcare system, Medicare for all, is the best way. Do you have an alternative?

Dr. Andrew Weil: I agree. You know, I think the political reality is that we’re not going to get that right away, but maybe we can inch our way towards that. Every other advanced nation provides healthcare for all of its citizens. At some point, we’re going to have to get in line.

Thom Hartmann: And in every other advanced country, which included countries as small as Costa Rica, with an average income of ninety seven hundred dollars a year. In every other advanced country in the world, it is a crime; you go to jail, it is a crime for a health insurance company to provide primary health insurance for profit.

Dr. Andrew Weil: The money-driven system that we have now has been awful, and I would love to see the profit motive taken out of medicine. It just doesn’t work.

Thom Hartmann: Yes. It doesn’t increase efficiencies, in fact it does the exact opposite, and people are dying as a consequence of it. Dr. Andrew Weil, his website, drweil.com, his most recent book, of many, “Why Our Health Matters”.

Dr. Andrew Weil: Good to talk to you.

Thom Hartmann: Say that again?

Dr. Andrew Weil: Good to talk to you.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah, it's excellent having you on. Thanks so much for dropping by.

Dr. Andrew Weil: You’re welcome.

Thom Hartmann: Keep up the good work, Sir.

Transcribed by Gerard Aukstiejus.