Mind Over Meds Quotes

“the 2012 annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers lists OTC cough-cold medications among the top three products associated with fatality in children under age five.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Mindfulness meditation has been shown to reduce the incidence, severity, and duration of cold symptoms, as has moderate exercise.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Andrographis (Andrographis paniculata), an herb commonly used in traditional Indian medicine (Ayurveda), has been shown to reduce symptoms both alone and when combined with another herb, eleuthero (Eleutherococcus senticosus). Astragalus (Astragalus membranaceus), obtained from the root of a plant in the pea family, has been used for centuries in China to ward off respiratory infections. I recommend it preventively throughout cold and flu season, especially for people who tend to catch “everything going around.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“just as bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics, the flu virus is beginning to develop resistance to NAIs, specifically to oseltamivir: Spanakis N, Pitiriga V, Gennimata, V, et al. “A review of neuraminidase inhibitor susceptibility in influenza strains.” Expert Rev Anti Infect Ther 2014;12:1325–36. Nitsch-Osuch A, Brydak LB. “Influenza viruses resistant to neuraminidase inhibitors.” ACTA BP 2014;61:505–8. 77:”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“whopping 26 percent of adults in the United States are now taking a statin, at an annual cost to the health care system of more than $20 billion:”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Keep in mind that doctors are frequently paid thousands of dollars to promote drugs to other doctors and allied health care professionals. The cozy (and lucrative) relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and physicians has become such a problem that the Affordable Care Act mandates public disclosure of these payments.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Hypertension may be a silent killer, but it is also usually a very slow one. There is almost always time to experiment with lifestyle changes and other measures before starting on antihypertensive drugs.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Many people in our population suffer from chronic overactivity of the sympathetic nervous system, as if it were reacting to an emergency that never ends, and this is surely one root of hypertension.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“With opioid-induced analgesia, a patient may report that “the pain is still there, but it doesn’t bother me” or “it is as if the pain is happening to someone else.” Under hypnosis people often make the same kinds of statements.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“The long-term studies that could give us answers are hard to do on children, but they have been done on rats, and the results should give us pause. Exposure to methylphenidate in adolescent rats is associated with persistent neurobehavioral consequences in later life. It makes them more sensitive to stress and more anxious—hardly changes we would like to see in our children.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Another study, described in the book The ADHD Explosion, showed that the rate of ADHD skyrocketed in locations where “No Child Left Behind” and similar programs were put in place.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Before the 1960s, bipolar disorder was hardly recognized in children, but by the 1990s, its incidence had exploded, much more than in adults. Was this sudden increase due to a real increase in prevalence, to better reporting, to applying the diagnosis more broadly, or perhaps to an ill-advised trend toward giving psychiatric medications to young people? We don’t know.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“At present, psychiatry is ruled by the biomedical model, which attributes all disturbed mental and emotional function to imbalances in brain chemistry, treatable with drugs. If this were the whole story, psychiatric drugs would be much more effective than they are. Pharmaceutical companies exaggerate their benefits and downplay their risks in marketing them to both doctors and the public.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Aggressive direct-to-consumer marketing of these drugs certainly accounts for much of their popularity. Big Pharma has convinced many people that ordinary states of sadness represent imbalances in brain chemistry that antidepressant medications can correct. But a growing body of data suggests that for mild to moderate depression, the drugs are no more effective than placebos.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“The word psychiatry derives from Greek roots meaning “soul doctoring”—a noble enterprise. Sadly, psychiatry today has lost touch with its roots. It is now dominated by the biomedical model, which attributes all disturbances of mental and emotional health to imbalances of brain biochemistry, correctable by medication. Big Pharma has taken great advantage of this by marketing an array of drugs to treat depression, anxiety, and major mental illnesses.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“The pharmaceutical antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as fluoxetine (Prozac), sertraline (Zoloft), and paroxetine (Paxil), decrease platelet clumping in a different way from NSAIDs. When NSAIDs and SSRIs are taken together, the risk of bleeding increases. Herbal remedies and supplements that affect platelets and should be avoided by those on NSAIDs include danshen (Salvia miltiorrhiza), dong quai (Angelica sinensis), evening primrose oil, and willow bark.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Salicylic acid, the precursor of aspirin, is a constituent of willow bark, a folk remedy used for centuries in diverse parts of the world. Hippocrates prescribed willow bark tea for headache 2,400 years ago. Aspirin was synthesized in 1897.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Integrative medicine also acknowledges the psycho-spiritual dimension of sleep. If there is a secret to falling asleep, it is the recognition that the awake part of us, by definition, simply cannot make it happen. In one sense, we never need to “go to sleep” because sleep already resides within each of us. We need, instead, to practice letting go of wakefulness. Mastering relaxation techniques, such as breath control, can help greatly.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is a structured form of meditation that has been shown to be very useful in improving sleep, as well as making it easier to taper off sleep aids.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Despite widely publicized concerns about their safety and efficacy, sleep aids remain the most popular treatment for insomnia. This is reinforced by the medicalization of sleep—an industry-concocted notion that insomnia is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain that can be remedied with a quick pharmaceutical fix. This perspective depersonalizes sleep. It discourages addressing critical personal and lifestyle issues and undermines our sleep self-efficacy—trust in our ability to heal our own sleep.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Newer antivirals, termed neuraminidase inhibitors (NAIs), include zanamivir (Relenza) and oseltamivir (Tamiflu). These drugs impair the release of newly formed viral particles from infected cells. When first introduced, the NAIs were trumpeted as the treatment of choice for the flu. Experience suggests this was an overstatement. Studies show that NAIs shorten the duration of flu by about one day only. Alongside vaccination, they do appear to help prevent complications in those at risk, but they also have drawbacks. Zanamivir is associated with bronchospasm (wheezing) in individuals with chronic lung problems, while oseltamivir is known to cause dizziness, nausea, and vomiting.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Butterbur (Petasites hybridus) has been used for decades to treat allergies as well as asthma and migraine headaches and is one of the few botanicals to go head-to-head with a drug in a clinical trial.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own

“Many supplements and botanicals have proven value in controlling allergic rhinitis. Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) is one of the best natural remedies. It is best taken in freeze-dried form in capsules.”
― Andrew Weil, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own