There’s a whole new section about the basic science underpinning CAM. And in terms of medical education, the way you would see this book is as the basic science text for CAM, together with clinical sciences. Medicine is usually taught in a sequence of basic medical sciences followed by clinical sciences.

That’s true of chiropractic education, as well.

Fundamentals is the basic science book on CAM, though it also incorporates clinical sciences. Aside from the earlier foreword by Dr. Koop, the former Surgeon General (who is now 96 years old), we have a new foreword by Avi Haramati, of Georgetown, who was president of the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine. He does a nice job of talking about the educational purpose of the book. And believe it or not, we also have another foreword in the new edition from George Lundberg, the former editor for twenty years of the Journal of the American Medical Association, with whom I keep up an email correspondence. His foreword is called, “The Good Medicine Guide to CAM.” He basically says, “These are the principles of good medicine, and the CAM that works is just good medicine.” In my little world of textbooks, my role of being a scribe, these are breakthroughs.

Speaking of the scribe role, I guess there’s Odysseus and then there’s Homer. It may be that accepting that one is Homer rather than Odysseus, the scribe rather than the epic hero, can be a hard thing to swallow. But overall, the life of Homer is potentially a life very well lived.

[Laughter]. At least Homer eventually got to practice what he preached. I don’t know if you knew this, but when David Kessler stepped down as head of the FDA, I was put forth as a nominee by former Surgeon General Koop as well as Senator Harkin, who knew me from my work in CAM. It turns out that when Kessler left, Bill Clinton gave the assignment to replace him to Vice President Al Gore. Being a smart politician, Gore went to Tom Harkin, who chaired the committee that funds the FDA. It’s funded under the Agriculture Department appropriations bill, not Health and Human Services. So I was interviewed by Tom Harkin, Tom Daschle, the White House counsel, and others. It was fun and interesting.

But I had just started as Executive Director of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia and that played a role in my ultimately not pursuing a return to Washington, DC, at that time. One reason Dr. Koop wanted me to lead FDA was because, based on our personal relationship, he figured he could keep after me the way he kept after Kessler to regulate nicotine as a drug. And, within the last year, that has finally happened! Another idea was, if we can get Micozzi in there, he’ll fix everything with dietary supplements and CAM. And you know what I found out afterwards? That the drug companies were okay with my nomination. How could the drug companies have that position? After all, my CAM textbook was out and I had been doing all these national conferences on non-drug healing. Oddly enough, despite my work on all of this, it was the food industry where my nomination ran into difficulty. They didn’t know me, I was later told.

What is your sense of the state of the medical profession today?

We have a middle generation of physicians, like the one I go to myself, that know nothing but numbers. They don’t touch you, they don’t look at you, and it’s all defensive medicine. You go in and you say, “My knee hurts and I think it might be arthritis.” And they say. “There’s nothing we can do about that, but you’re 55 years old, so we better send you to the cardiologist.” And they’ll do a $6000 workup to make sure you’re not about to drop from a heart attack. Then they send you to the dermatologist because you’ve got moles, and then to the eye doctor. Then, when they’ve concluded that you’re not about to have a heart attack, you don’t have skin cancer, and you’re not about to go blind, they lose interest because they’re not at risk anymore. Do you understand what I’m saying?