Weil is the name of the following German towns:

• Weil, Bavaria
• Weil am Rhein, Baden-Württemberg
• Weil der Stadt, Baden-Württemberg
• Weil im Schönbuch, Baden-Württemberg

Weil may also refer to:

• Weil (surname), including people with the surname Weill, Weyl
• Doctor Weil (Mega Man Zero), a fictional character from the Mega Man Zero video game series
• Weil (river), Germany (near Weilburg)
• Weil-Marbach, now the Marbach stud in Baden-Wurttenburg

See also[link]

• Weill (disambiguation)
• Weil, Gotshal & Manges, law firm founded in the United States
• Weil's disease

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Gary Taubes (born April 30, 1956) is an American science writer.

He is the author of Nobel Dreams (1987), Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993), and Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), titled The Diet Delusion (2008) in the UK and Australia.^[1] His book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It was released in December 2010. In December 2010 Taubes launched his own blog at GaryTaubes.com to promote the book's release and to respond to critics.

Biography[link]

Born in Rochester, New York, Taubes studied applied physics at Harvard University and aerospace engineering at Stanford University (MS, 1978). After receiving a master's degree in journalism at Columbia University in 1981, Taubes joined Discover magazine as a staff reporter in 1982.^[2] Since then he has written numerous articles for Discover, Science and other magazines. Originally focusing on physics issues, his interests have more recently turned to medicine and nutrition.

Taubes's books have all dealt with scientific controversies. Nobel Dreams takes a critical look at the politics and experimental techniques behind the Nobel Prize-winning work of physicist Carlo Rubbia. Bad Science is a chronicle of the short-lived media frenzy surrounding the Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion experiments of 1989.

His brother, Clifford Henry Taubes, is the William Petschek Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University.^[3]

Dietary science[link]

Gary Taubes on Bookbits radio.

Taubes gained prominence in the low-carb diet debate following the publication of his 2002 New York Times Magazine piece "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?". The article, which questioned the efficacy and health benefits of low-fat diets, was seen as defending the Atkins diet against the medical establishment, and it became extremely controversial. Taubes himself stated: "[E]ven though I knew the article would be the most controversial article the Times Magazine ran all year, [the reaction] still shocked me."^[4] The Center for Science in the Public Interest published a rebuttal to the Times article in its November 2002 newsletter.^[5] According to Taubes: "[T]he CSPI is an advocacy group that has been pushing low-fat diets since the 1970s."^[6]

In 2007, Taubes published his book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (published as The Diet Delusion in the UK). This book examined how a hypothesis became dogma and claimed to show how the scientific method was circumvented so a contestable hypothesis could remain unchallenged. The book uses data and studies compiled from dietary research from as early as the 19th century.^[7][8]

Taubes's hypothesis is that the medical community and the federal government of the United States of America have relied upon misinterpreted scientific data on nutrition to build the prevailing paradigm about what constitutes healthful eating. Taubes makes the case that — contrary to the conventional wisdom — it is refined carbohydrates that are responsible for heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, and many other maladies of civilization. In the Epilogue to Good Calories, Bad Calories on page 454, Taubes notes ten "inescapable" conclusions, the first of which is:^[9]

Taubes includes information and studies which indicate that physical exercise increases appetite to a degree that makes it an inefficient tool in weight loss. He tracks the origins of commonly accepted dietary advice and aims to show that information that is filtered to the public often contradicts scientific evidence. On October 19, 2007 Taubes appeared on Larry King Live to discuss his book. Although Taubes has no formal training in nutrition or medicine, his book was praised as "raising interesting and valuable points" by Andrew Weil, a proponent of alternative medicine, while Mehmet Oz and trainer Jillian Michaels who appeared on the same program disagreed with Taubes on many questions.^[10]

The reviews for Good Calories, Bad Calories have varied. George Bray of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana notes in his review that the book "...has much useful information and is well worth reading." but "Obese people clearly eat more than do lean ones."^[11] Taubes, in a letter to the editor in the same journal, clarifies some of the comments made by Bray. Taubes notes, "The hypothesis favored by Bray and a half century of authorities on human obesity is that fat accumulation is fundamentally caused by positive energy balance." Taubes responds, "The alternative hypothesis begins with the fundamental observation that obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation and then asks the obvious question, what regulates fat accumulation. This was elucidated by 1965 and has never been controversial. 'Insulin is the principle regulator of fat metabolism'..."^[12]

John Tierney in his New York Times review entitled "Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus", discusses information cascades and the role of Ancel Keys in widely held beliefs related to diet and fat. Tierney quotes Taubes in noting that "the most rigorous meta-analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets, published in 2001 by the Cochrane Collaboration, concluded that they had no significant effect on mortality."^[13]

Awards[link]

Taubes has won the Science in Society Journalism Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times and was awarded an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship for 1996-97.^[4] He is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation independent investigator in health policy.^[14]

See also[link]

• William Banting

References[link]

Publications[link]

• Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment. Random House. 1986. ISBN 978-0-394-54503-5. 
• Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion. Random House. 1993. ISBN 978-0-394-58456-0. 
• Epidemiology Faces Its Limits, Science, July 1995.
• Nobel Gas, Slate, October 11, 1997.
• The Soft Science of Dietary Fat, Science, March 2001.
• What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?, New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2002.
• Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?, New York Times, September 17, 2007.
• Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. Knopf. 2007. ISBN 978-1-4000-4078-0.  (Also published as The Diet Delusion ISBN 978-0-09-189141-1)
• Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. 2010. 
• Is Sugar Toxic?. The New York Times, April 13, 2011.

External links[link]

• (Link is dead) Webcast of Lecture by Gary Taubes at University of California, Berkeley -- "The Quality of Calories: What Makes Us Fat and Why Nobody Seems to Care"
• Webcast of Lecture by Gary Taubes at Stevens Institute of Technology, Center for Science Writings, Hoboken, NJ, USA, 2/6/2008 -- "Big Fat Lies"
• Article by Gary Taubes questioning the efficacy of exercise in weight loss -- "We Can't Work It Out"
• Excerpt from Good Calories, Bad Calories and NPR interview -- "Not All Calories Are Created Equal, Author Says".
• Interview with Gary Taubes by Knight Fellowships at MIT
• Interview with Gary Taubes by John Horgan (Stevens Center for Science Writing, Cross-check): "Science Saturday: Why We Get Fat"
• Interview with Gary Taubes by Aaron McCloud, Seattle, 2012, and the Interview Transcript

Liza Weil
Weil at a Warner Bros. Television event celebrating the 100th episode of her series Gilmore Girls, 2005
Born	Liza Rebecca Weil (1977-06-05) June 5, 1977 (age 35) New Jersey, U.S.
Years active	1984–present overall, 1993–present professionally
Spouse	Paul Adelstein (November 2006–present)

Liza Rebecca Weil (born June 5, 1977) is an American actress. She is known for her role as Paris Geller in the television drama Gilmore Girls, and as former White House intern Amanda Tanner in the first season of the ABC/Shonda Rhimes series Scandal. She has guest-starred on programs such as The Adventures of Pete & Pete, ER, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Grey's Anatomy, and The West Wing.

Early life[link]

Weil was born in New Jersey to a family of actors. Her parents, Lisa and Marc Weil, toured Europe with their own comedy troupe, The Madhouse Company of London with her in tow. Weil had aspirations of becoming an archaeologist in her younger years, because of the Indiana Jones film trilogy and a childhood crush on Harrison Ford.^[1] In 1984, at the age of seven, her family settled down in suburban Lansdale, Pennsylvania, a community north-northwest of Philadelphia, where her parents continue to reside. In contrast to her Gilmore Girls character, Weil was a self-avowed average student in high school who focused more on her budding acting career than her studies.^[2] Weil traveled frequently to New York City for professional auditions, and acted in productions both off-Broadway and in Philadelphia's theatrical community before pursuing her film and television career. She is a 1995 graduate of the borough's North Penn High School.

Career[link]

Weil continues to be active in the Los Angeles theatrical community during hiatuses, is a regular performer at the Ojai Playwrights Conference in early August and radio dramas with L.A. Theatre Works, and still occasionally performs in live theater in Philadelphia and New York. She has acted with every member of her family; in 2004, she headlined with her father in a well-received community theater production of Proof at the Montgomery Theater in Souderton, Pennsylvania, just north of her adopted hometown of Lansdale. Her first ever television role in 1994, which was an episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete called "Yellow Fever", found her playing a bully alongside her mother Lisa, who played a teacher. Finally her younger sister Samantha shared the screen with Liza in Gilmore Girls's third season finale, "Those Are Strings, Pinocchio". Samantha Weil played a student named Bernadette (who was unrelated to Paris) making out a video yearbook entry in front of an impatient Paris, standing off to the side waiting to make her own.

An alumna of Columbia University, Weil received her first major feature film role co-starring with Kevin Bacon in Stir of Echoes. Before that role, she was the star of the 1998 independent film Whatever, and her first film in 1996 was the short film A Cure For Serpents, where she played the daughter of a mysophobic woman bringing to her home a boyfriend who was not as obsessive with cleanliness, and how the mother deals with the challenge. She has also done several other short and feature-length independent films, which include Motel Jerusalem, Scar, and Lullaby, and shown interest in behind-the-camera work.

Weil was originally considered for the role of Rory Gilmore by Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino before Alexis Bledel won the role; the character of Paris Geller was created especially for Weil.

Current work[link]

In 2006, Weil was featured in the horror themed short film Grace, in which her character suffers a miscarriage, yet decides to carry the baby to term with terrifying results. The film, which also featured Brian Austin Green, premiered at the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention on June 2, 2006, and is the basis for the 2009 feature film of the same name.^[3] She also had a minor role as a humane society worker in the Molly Shannon film Year of the Dog, and appeared as Doris Delay in the 2008 biographical film Neal Cassady, and as a reporter in the 2010 live-action rotoscoping film Mars, which is currently on the film festival circuit.

Weil also voiced a public service announcement which aired from June–October 2007 and aired on radio stations in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley in support of the American Diabetes Association's Step Up to Fight Diabetes staircase climb event, which took place in Center City Philadelphia on October 20, 2007.

In 2009 Weil returned to her roots as a regular guest star in various television series, including appearances in Eleventh Hour, CSI, In Plain Sight, Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice and in February 2010 began a run as Dr. Glass on the popular Internet series Anyone But Me; series creator Susan Miller officiated at Weil's wedding to Paul Adelstein in 2006.^[4]

In March 2011 it was confirmed that Weil had signed for the role of Amanda Tanner, a White House intern, in Shonda Rhimes's pilot, Scandal, for ABC.^[5][6] It was picked up by the network for their midseason 2011-12 schedule on May 13, 2011^[7], and Weil had a recurring, though critical role in the series' first season^[5], with her name submitted by ABC Studios for Emmy consideration in the category for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series^[8].

Personal life[link]

As of 2006, Weil resided in Santa Monica and is a film and movie buff. She married Paul Adelstein, who played Paul Kellerman on the Fox series Prison Break, and who now plays Dr. Cooper Freedman on ABC's Private Practice, a spin-off series from Grey's Anatomy, in a Jewish ceremony in November 2006.^[9] They had previously known each other through theatrical projects.^[10] The two have since acted together in three film projects, the 2007 short Order Up, the 2008 Gregory Dark-helmed Frenemy, and The Missing Person. She also appeared in an episode of Private Practice on February 24, 2011,^[11] although she and Adelstein had no scenes together.

Weil became pregnant in mid-2009 with her and Adelstein's first child, a girl named Josephine Elizabeth Weil-Adelstein, who was born around April 20, 2010.^[12][13] In 2006, she also became an aunt, when her sister Samantha had a child after she moved to the Los Angeles area.^[14]

Weil is left-handed, and a natural brunette, having that hair color through at least 2000; it is believed she was told to dye it dark-blonde for her Gilmore Girls role to contrast with Bledel/Rory's brown hair. After the series, she went back to her original brown hair color,^[15] though has subsequently returned to being a blonde. Amy Sherman-Palladino has complimented Weil's skin as "the best she's ever seen in her life".^[16]

Filmography[link]

References[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Liza Weil

External links[link]

• Liza Weil at the Internet Movie Database
• Liza Weil on Twitter

Andrew Thomas Weil (born June 8, 1942) is an American author and physician, who established the field of integrative medicine which attempts to integrate alternative and conventional medicine. Weil is the author of several best-selling books and operates a website and monthly newsletter promoting general health and healthy aging. He is the founder and program director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine (formerly the Program in Integrative Medicine), which he started in 1994 at the University of Arizona.^[1] He is frequently criticised for his promotion of alternative medicine,^[2][3][4] drug use and the potential conflicts of interest this raises in relation to his business dealings.^[5][6][7]

Andrew Weil was born to parents of German and Ukrainian descent. His parents owned a millinery store.^[8] He attended Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. As an undergraduate, Weil majored in botany and wrote his thesis on the narcotic properties of nutmeg,^[9] and also served as an editor of the Harvard Crimson and the Harvard Lampoon.^[10] After medical school, Weil did not seek residency. He completed a medical internship at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and subsequently worked for a year with the National Institute of Mental Health. From 1971-1974, he traveled throughout South America as a fellow for the Institute of Current World Affairs.^[11] He published his first book, The Natural Mind, in 1972. Weil has since written or co-written nine books, and was a regular contributor to High Times magazine from 1975 to 1983.^[12] His early works explored altered states of consciousness, but he has since expanded his scope to encompass healthy lifestyles and health care in general. In the last ten years, Weil has focused much of his work on the health concerns of older Americans. His book, Healthy Aging, looks at growing older from a physical, social and cross-cultural perspective, and emphasizes that aging cannot be reversed, but can be accompanied by good health, "serenity, wisdom, and its own kind of power and grace". His book, Why our Health Matters, is focused on health care reform.

Philosophy[link]

Weil's general view is that mainstream and alternative medicine are complementary approaches that should be utilized in conjunction with one another (what he terms integrative medicine). Specifically, he maintains that mainstream medicine is well-suited to crisis intervention, whereas alternative medicine is best utilized for prevention and health maintenance.^{[citation needed]} He promotes integrative medicine as a combination of both approaches. Nutrition, exercise, and stress reduction are emphasized in almost all of Weil's health works.

Because the nature of integrative medicine is to attempt to merge evidence based medicine with alternative medicine techniques, as well as partially focusing treatment on the "spiritual", it is not without controversy and regarded by many medical experts as pseudoscience. Accordingly, it falls into the same category of criticisms as much of alternative medicine does.^[3][13]

Dr. Arnold Relman, editor in chief emeritus of The New England Journal of Medicine wrote:

There are not two kinds of medicine, one conventional and the other unconventional, that can be practiced jointly in a new kind of 'integrative medicine.' Nor, as Andrew Weil and his friends also would have us believe, are there two kinds of thinking, or two ways to find out which treatments work and which do not. In the best kind of medical practice, all proposed treatments must be tested objectively. In the end, there will only be treatments that pass that test and those that do not, those that are proven worthwhile and those that are not. Can there be any reasonable 'alternative'?^[2]

Speaking of government funding studies of integrating alternative medicine techniques into the mainstream, Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale School of Medicine wrote that it "is used to lend an appearance of legitimacy to treatments that are not legitimate." Dr. Marcia Angell, former executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine says, "It's a new name for snake oil."^[3]

Weil has acknowledged the influence of many individuals, philosophical and spiritual ideas, and techniques on his approach to alternative medicine. Among the individuals who strongly influenced Weil's professional and personal life is the late osteopath Robert C. Fulford, who specialized in cranial manipulation.^[14][15]

Weil has previously expressed opposition to the war on drugs, citing the benefits of many banned plants. He promotes the medical use of whole-plants as a less problematic approach to treatment than synthetic pharmaceuticals. Weil has also written about the healing properties of medicinal mushrooms and Psilocybin (the active component in "magic mushrooms") in several of his books.

Honors[link]

• Forbes on-line magazine wrote: "Dr. Weil, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, is one of the most widely known and respected alternative medicine gurus. For five years, he has offered straightforward tips and advice on achieving wellness through natural means and educating the public on alternative therapies" and listed his web site in their Best of the Web Directory in the "Alternative Medicine" category,^[16] listing it as one of the three "Best of the Web" picks in that category.^[17]
• Weil appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1997 and 2005. Time Magazine also named him one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997 and one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2005. He received the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences from Smithsonian Associates in 2005.
• Mycologists Dr. Gustan Guzman, Fidel Tapia, and Paul Stamets honored Weil by naming a newly discovered mushroom, Psilocybe weilii, in 1995.
• Weil was honored by the Institute for Health and Healing in San Francisco as their 2006 Pioneer in Integrative Medicine.
• He was inducted into the Academy of Achievement in 1998.^[1]
• Weil was honored by the New York Open Center [2] in 2004 as having made "extraordinary contributions to public awareness of integrative and complementary medicine."

Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine (AzCIM)[link]

In 1994, Weil founded the Program in Integrative Medicine (PIM) at University Medical Center and the University of Arizona in Tucson.^{[citation needed]} It offers residential and research fellowship programs and operates an outpatient clinic according to Weil's principles; emphasizing prevention over treatment and focusing on nutrition, botanical medicines and mind-body interventions to complement conventional synthetic drug and surgery protocols. It also operates an annual Nutrition and Health Conference and a Botanical Medicine conference.^{[citation needed]} As of 2008, more than 450 physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners had completed the program. Weil says the expense associated with running PIM, reportedly $3 million annually, led him to agree to lend his name to commercial products to provide steady revenue for this and other research efforts in line with his philosophy.^{[citation needed]}

In April 2008, the Arizona Board of Regents recognized the Program as a Center of Excellence and renamed it the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine.^{[citation needed]} Since the founding of the University of Arizona program, academic instruction in integrative medicine has grown rapidly.^{[citation needed]} There are now 42 academic medical centers that offer integrative medicine programs, including the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School and Georgetown, Duke and Columbia Universities.^{[citation needed]}

Diet advocacy[link]

Weil is a proponent of a diet rich in organic fruits and vegetables and regular consumption of fish. He is also an outspoken critic of partially hydrogenated oils. In an interview on Larry King Live, Weil claimed that sugar, starch, refined carbohydrates, and trans-fats are more dangerous to the human body than saturated fats. Weil is also an advocate for certain medicinal mushrooms in a daily diet.[3]

Timothy Leary and Harvard[link]

In Fall 1960 Weil was an 18-year-old Harvard freshman. He was already interested in doing research on mind-altering drugs. He learned of the Harvard Psilocybin Project that was being run by two Harvard professors: Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass). Weil interviewed with Leary and Alpert to become part of their project, but was turned away because he was an undergraduate. Leary and Alpert had made an agreement with Harvard that they would not use undergraduates in their project. After this, Weil and other undergraduates managed to procure mescaline, and they did their own experiments with it. Weil later stopped taking the drugs (at that time).^[18]

In May 1963, Weil was an editor of The Harvard Crimson. Leary and Alpert were continuing their activities amidst various controversies, including a criminal investigation of the project by Massachusetts authorities. The Harvard administration wanted to remove Alpert, and Weil was helping them to gather evidence against him. At this time Weil wrote an exposé article on Leary and Alpert for the Crimson.^[19] After the article was published, Alpert was fired for giving psychedelics to an undergraduate. Leary, who was already in Mexico when the article was published, was fired for "leaving Cambridge and his classes without permission."^[20][21]

Weil also wrote a negative article on the Harvard drug scandal for the November 1963 issue of Look magazine.^[22]

About five years later, Weil came to regret his actions with these articles. He reconciled his differences with Leary, and attempted to do the same with Alpert.^[23]

Drug use[link]

Weil has been very open about his own experimental and recreational use of numerous drugs including narcotics and mind-altering substances:

"I think I've tried about every drug in Chocolate to Morphine, although there may be one or two there that I haven't. I wouldn't write about any I didn't try, or if I did I would say that I hadn't tried it. There's a lot of things I've never come back for a second try for and there's some things I've used for varying periods and then stopped using."^[24]

He believes that there's no such thing as good drugs and bad drugs,^[24] and would recommend that his patients use Ecstasy (MDMA) if it were legal:

"In an exclusive interview with myprimetime.com, author and medical expert Dr. Andrew Weil explained that he would welcome the drug Ecstasy (MDMA) to his repertoire of patient recommendations if the drug was lawful."^[25]

He considers current methods and attitudes aimed at stopping "the drug problem" to be themselves problematic:

"I often have the suspicion that everything that we do in the name of stopping the drug problem is the drug problem. It's not just the laws but the whole mentality that sees drugs as the problem and tries to fight them. By doing that I think we've made it all worse."^[24]

Weil endorsed children's book about marijuana called "It's Just a Plant," writing, "A delightful book... a glimpse of what enlightened drug education could be." ^[26]

Criticisms[link]

Some have criticized Weil for promoting unverified beliefs. Weil's rejection of some aspects of evidence-based medicine and promotion of alternative medicine practices that are not verifiably efficacious has been criticized by noted physicians such as Arnold S. Relman in his 1998 article "A Trip to Stonesville: Some Notes on Andrew Weil".^[2] Weil has also promoted food products such as fruit and nut bars by combining his personal brand with Arran Stephens' Nature's Path brand.^[5]

Barry L. Beyerstein, PhD, Simon Fraser University, criticizes aspects of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), asserting that "As a major New Age industry, CAM shares the movement's magical world-view. On advocating emotional criteria for truth over criteria based on empirical data and logic, New Age medical gurus such as Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra have convinced many that 'anything goes,'" later stating that "By denigrating science, these detractors have enlarged the potential following for magical and pseudoscientific health product." ^[4] Simon Singh echoes this criticism going as far as saying that while Weil promotes some good things like exercise and less smoking that "much of his advice is nonsense".^[27]

In a debate between Dr. Weil and Dr. Steven Knope of Tucson, Arizona, televised on public television affiliate KUAT-TV, Knope is critical of Weil for what he considers irresponsible advocacy of untested treatments by Weil.^[28]

Regarding his journalism for Time Magazine (see publications, below), The Center for Science in the Public Interest pointed out that in one Time magazine column by Weil, he touts the benefits of fish oil supplements. CSPI stated, "The column was sparked by a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that fish oil supplements did not reduce the risk of serious abnormal heart rhythms. The article failed to disclose that Dr. Weil sells his own brand of fish oil supplements on his website.".^[7] Healthwyze.org points out an additional conflict of interest with Time Magazine, stating, "Time Magazine featured Dr. Weil not once, but twice on its cover, for issues which were largely dedicated to him. One of the articles confessed that Time Magazine was a partner corporation of Time New Media, which was bargaining with Weil for an affiliation with his website." ^[6]

In 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to a company associated with Weil (Weil Lifestyle LLC) as a package of urgent measures to protect consumers from products that, without approval or authorization by FDA, claimed to diagnose, mitigate, prevent, treat or cure H1N1 Flu Virus in people. Weil Lifestyle had made several implicit claims in its marketing literature that certain products could help ward off the virus.^[29]

Books and publications[link]

Weil's writings span over thirty years and include the following ten books:

• The Natural Mind: An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness (1972, rev. 2004)
• Marriage of Sun and Moon: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Consciousness (1980, rev. 2004)
• Health and Healing (1983, rev. 2004)
• with Winifred Rosen, 1983 (2004), From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything you need to know about mind-altering drugs, Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0-618-48379-9 
• Spontaneous Healing (1995)
• Natural Health, Natural Medicine (1995, rev. 2004)
• 8 Weeks to Optimum Health (1997, rev. 2006)
• Eating Well for Optimum Health (2000)
• Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing, audio CD, Sounds True (2000)
• The Healthy Kitchen with Rosie Daley (2002)
• Healthy Aging (2005)
• Why Our Health Matters (September 2009)
• Spontaneous Happiness (2011)

He has written forewords for books by Paul Stamets, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Tolly Burkan, and Wade Davis, among others.

Weil occasionally writes articles for Time Magazine and Huffington Post.^[30][31]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Andrew Weil

• Andrew Weil official website
• Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, formerly the Program in Integrative Medicine, University of Arizona

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (October 2007)

Typical Alf

Alf Poier (born 22 February 1967 in Judenburg, Styria) is an Austrian artist and stand-up comedian.

Born in Judenburg in Styria, he started doing cabaret in 1995 in Graz, and has won several prizes for his work, including the Salzburger Stier in 1998, the Deutscher Kleinkunstpreis, Prix Phanteon and RTL Comedy Award in 2000 and the Austrian Karl in 2002.

In 2003, Poier participated in the Eurovision Song Contest 2003^[1] and secured 6th place with his entry Weil der Mensch zählt ("Man is The Measure Of All Things"). The song, and his stage act, were a parody of the contest's excesses.

Although his result was considerably better than most of the pre-contest predictions, Poier spent several hours mischievously telling anyone that would listen that his 'low' placing was an outrage, that Europe had demonstrably shown itself to have no musical taste, and that he wasn't sure if the shame would permit him to return to Austria. This included an appearance on Liquid Eurovision, shown on the UK channel BBC Three immediately after the 2003 contest ended, where after saying the above he shouted "I hate this contest! Fuck this contest!", causing much laughter from the presenters.

In 2005, his bid to represent Austria in the contest for a second time put him in the spotlight for more serious reasons, as some people took offence at the lyrics of one of his songs, Good Old Europe is Dying. Having deleted the offending lines, albeit while insisting they had been misinterpreted, Poier took the characteristically 'oddball' song to the brink of securing the Austrian national selection, only to be "narrowly" beaten by folk band Global Kryner. In the end, he arguably only missed out because, in Y asi, Global Kryner had somehow succeeded in crafting a song that is even more colourful than anything Poier has yet attempted, featuring as it does Latin-style music liberally peppered with bouts of yodelling. Nevertheless, Poier was able to - very loudly - claim a moral victory after it emerged that his song had actually garnered the most votes (2nd place with 106.000 for Poier, 1st place with 60.000 for Global Kryner), and had only been thwarted by the regional points system that was used.

Alf Poiers statement after the show:

"Wer auf dieser Welt Gerechtigkeit fordert ist ein Idiot!

Wer auf dieser Welt Verständnis fordert ist geistesgestört!

Ich danke Euch allen im Namen der Wahrheit!

Alf Poier Platz 2 mit 106.000 Stimmen

Global Kryner Platz 1 mit 60.000 Stimmen

Euer geistesgestörter Idiot Alf Poier"

"Who demands justice in this world is an idiot!

Who demands understanding in this world suffers on mental disorder!

I thank you all in the name of truth!

Alf Poier, 2nd place with 106.000 votes

Global Kryner, 1st place with 60.000 votes

Your mental disordered idiot, Alf Poier"

Discography[link]

• 1996: Himmel, Arsch & Gartenzwerg (Album-CD, Alf Poier und die obersteirische Wolfshilfe)
• 2001: Zen (Album-CD)
• 2003: Weil der Mensch zählt (Single-CD)
• 2003: Alf singt die schönsten Lieder mit Band (Album-CD)
• 2003: Mitsubischi (DVD, Neuerscheinung 2008)
• 2005: Good Old Europe Is Dying (Single-CD)
• 2005: Lustige Lieder der Traurigkeit und Not (Album-CD)
• 2007: Zen (DVD)
• 2007: Kill Eulenspiegel (DVD)
• 2009: Satsang (DVD)
• 2010: This Isn’t It (Album-CD, live)
• 2011: Happy Song (Download-Single, Alf Poier & Die Obersteirische Wolfshilfe)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Alf Poier's official homepage
• A Forum dedicated to Alf Poier and other comedy
• Myspace