Dr. Victoria Maizes

Hi, Andy.

Dr. Andrew Weil

Hi, Victoria. Today we're going to turn the tables and you are going to be our guest. And I've invited our friend and colleague, doctor Ann Marie Chiasson, an integrative medicine physician and director of the fellowship at our center to co-host with me and to discuss your new book.

Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson

Thank you, I'm happy to be here.

Dr. Andrew Weil

I think most of listeners will know that Victoria Maizes, M.D., is the founding executive director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine and a professor of medicine, family medicine and public health at the University of Arizona. She is an internationally recognized thought leader in the field.

She's the editor of the Oxford University Press volume on Integrative Women's Health and the author of the book, Be Fruitful, The Essential Guide to Maximizing Fertility and Giving Birth to a Healthy Child.

And now, Victoria, I understand that you have a new book due out in January of 2026. Do you want to tell us about that?

Dr. Victoria Maizes

Yes. So the new book is called Heal Faster, Unlock Your Body's, Rapid Recovery System. And it's really an opportunity to encourage people to use what I think I learned from you about the innate ability of the body to heal, and I call it a rapid recovery system.

00:04:10:09 - 00:04:29:08

Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson

I'm really excited for this conversation. Because, how the body's innate healing system works and how we can support has been something we've been studying for a long time in integrative medicine. So, I'm so excited that you've written a book that will allow patients to utilize the tools and techniques that we've been learning about.

Dr. Andrew Weil

You've heard me say over the years that, I find repeatedly that most people, have little confidence in their bodies healing abilities how do you help them gain more confidence in that?

Dr. Victoria Maizes

Well, it is such a strange phenomenon because the body has this ability to heal Andy your sometimes talk about one of the most obvious things is if you cut your finger, you can notice over the next days that it gets a little red, a little swollen, a little warm, and then the cut heals and it doesn't really need much from us to do that.

That doesn't just happen with a cut finger. It happens when we get a viral infection. Our body knows exactly how to pull the internal resources to mount an antiviral response, and we heal from that cold or respiratory infection. It even happens when have an emotional reaction. We may feel anxious. We may feel sad, we may feel grief. But with time, our body finds its way back to equilibrium. And so this is the norm, actually. And it's the exception when that doesn't happen. And what I do and heal faster is I both encourage people to trust, in their body's ability to restore normalcy. And then I talk about, well, what do you do if that doesn't happen?

Dr. Andrew Weil

As practitioners, I think, we can help those that need healing response. But I don't think we can put it into people. You know, we don't put healing into people. We can we can unblock it. We can help it along. But that's, I think, an important distinction.

Dr. Victoria Maizes

I totally agree, in my experience, one of the myths that I think is out there is that healing comes from external sources, that somehow it is the magic that, the doctor’s medicine does as opposed to the medicine potentially supporting your healing systems. Healing is innate.

Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson

So healthy nutrition is a core central tenet of integrative medicine. And what does heal faster add to that conversation.

Dr. Victoria Maizes

You know, we talk a lot in integrative medicine about what we eat. And, we pay a lot of attention to the ways in which food can be your friend. It can help soothe inflammation, which is at the root of so many, diseases that people suffer from. But I really like to personalize my dietary recommendations. And so for some people, they discover, I discovered this, that gluten gave me symptoms and I went off gluten and the symptoms resolve.

So we look at, for example, when would you use an elimination diet to discover that there's something that doesn't agree with you? Heartburn is a common complaint. Well, sometimes when you eliminate acid foods or coffee, red wine, the the symptoms of that heartburn go away. That would be a simple form of an elimination diet. In integrative medicine, we also think about, well, when should you eat?

And we've learned that not eating for 2 to 3 hours before bedtime is really wise. From the perspective of the circadian rhythm, and working with your body's internal clock, again supporting the rapid recovery reflex. So if you avoid eating in the 2 to 3 hours before bed, you have metabolized the food so that when you do go to bed, your body can do what it's meant to do during sleep and rest, which is reboot.

It is a time when you reboot, reboot the metabolism, you reboot the immune system, you lay down memories,

Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson

One common problem that so many people wrestle with Victoria's anxiety. And I saw that you have an entire chapter on anxiety in Heal Faster. Can you share some of the strategies that you share with the readers in your book?

Dr. Victoria Maizes

Yes, anxiety is incredibly common in our society right now, and, one of the things that I do is I think about anxiety from the perspective of the mind, the body and the spirit, which is how we think about human beings in general, in integrative medicine. So from the mind perspective, you might be able to reframe the experience of anxiety.

I'll give an example. In my own life, I was feeling anxious before my daughter got married, and I realized that actually I was excited. And, you know, that sounds like how could you be, excited instead of anxious? But sometimes anxiety is pointing out something that's important to you that matters to you. So you might feel anxious before the job interview. That's because you want that job. And so that may lead you to better prepare and do a better job during the interview. It's not necessarily a negative thing. You can use the body, a fast walk that often is something that helps many people. Exercise helps people manage their anxiety, as does yoga, as does Tai chi. These are physical ways. Move the body and the anxiety gets better. Spirit, there are many ways to do this. People use prayer where they use their faith tradition to help soothe their spirit. There are things like gratitude practice, which can help, relax the spirit. And in the book, I also talk about something that, people might consider body and that's, the use of dietary supplements that can be helpful as well.

Dr. Andrew Weil

You didn't mention breathing.

Dr. Victoria Maizes

Absolutely. So the breathing is something that integrates all of those things mind, body and spirit. And, it's, how do you teach the 4-7-8 breath? It's always available. It's free. It's a very easy thing to do in the moment. You could do it when you're stopped at a red light. You could do it before you go to sleep.

So breathwork is absolutely a wonderful way to manage anxiety.

Dr. Andrew Weil

One of the subjects that you've been very interested in over the years is environmental influences on health. How do you address that in the new book, and what advice do you give people?

Dr. Victoria Maizes

One of the most invisible things that impedes our body's innate system to heal are these environmental chemicals that we're exposed to. We're exposed in a whole variety of ways, but we often don't see them. We don't smell them. We don't recognize their effects. So, for example, environmental chemicals can affect our metabolism. They can disrupt our normal hormones and increase the risk of obesity, thyroid disease, potentially cancer.

We can experience air pollution. So those pollutants can affect our lungs and our cardiovascular system. We know that 1 in 6 deaths, for example, worldwide, is related to environmental toxins and especially air pollution. So you can say, well, what can I do about this? Well, there are very practical things you can do. For example, a Hepa filter, is a filter that filters out these small particles in the air pollution so that when you sleep, you could sleep in a room that's free of those kinds of pollutants.

And we actually have studies that show when people use a Hepa filter, their blood pressure goes down. If they have elevated blood pressure. You can purchase better products. That could be products for cleaning your house that have fewer of these chemicals. It could be the products you put on your skin or hair, like shampoo, or your moisturizer or your sunscreen.

And these things actually absorbed through the skin and affect our hormonal balance. So the good news is there's a wide range of things you could do to reduce your exposure to these environmental toxins and support your health. I think it may be one of the reasons we have more autoimmune disease, why we have more obesity, why we have more cancer.

And it really behooves us to pay attention to where are we getting exposed and how can we reduce our exposures.

Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson

One of the most important things I learned from you, Victoria, and I'm sure you have it in your book, is that it's such a huge topic, environmental medicine. You can't do it all at once. You get overwhelmed. And so how do you walk people through how to start making those changes?

Dr. Victoria Maizes

Yeah, I, like to tell people “the perfect is the enemy of the good” because it is scary. You start to hear about this and you just think we're doomed. I mean, what are we going to do? Well, I'd like to remind us that human beings evolve with these chemicals. For example, there are heavy metals in the soil and they make their way into our food.

So it's not like we've never been exposed to things like arsenic. We also, early in our evolution as humans, learned how to make fires and to cook our food. So we were exposed to the products of combustion. And so it's not like we never got exposed to these things. And our bodies actually have amazing detoxification systems.

Our liver knows how to detoxify. We detoxify when we use the bathroom either to urinate or to evacuate our bowels. We sweat. And in all of these ways, we reduce our exposure. So it's not like, oh my goodness, I got exposed. And now what can I do? It's really. Let's, not overwhelm those elimination systems, those detoxification systems.

And, let's reduce our exposures. I learned from you, Andy. The first step in detoxification is stop taking the toxin in. So organic foods is one way to have less toxin coming in in the form of pesticides and fungicides. You start where you are. I mean, for people for whom this information is brand new, maybe you switch out your plastic Tupperware for glass and you avoid microwaving in plastic for people who are more sophisticated, maybe we begin to scan with, with an app that a barcode of products, and you pick products that are safer and have fewer of these phthalates and parabens and other chemicals that we know are harmful to health.

Dr. Andrew Weil

In your recommendations for specific conditions, you often mention dietary supplements. Why do you consider them important? And what advice to give people about them?

Dr. Victoria Maizes

You know, I get so upset when I see all of this anti supplement bias in the media, and I find it hard to understand, supplements in general are so much safer than medications. And I do include supplements for a variety of reasons for vitamins and minerals, these micronutrients that we need to consume. Ideally we get them in the diet, but we don't always eat a perfect diet.

 So it becomes a little bit of an insurance policy if you take a multi vitamin, multi mineral supplement. But some people need more, they need more than they'd actually be able to get on the diet. This could be people who have genetic mutations where they need more B vitamins, for example. People who have depression or anxiety often do better if they supplement with additional B vitamins and B 50 complex, for example. There are ways in which we can choose a supplement, and it's way safer than the medicine we might use.

So, for example, for anxiety, people are often prescribed either benzodiazepines, which have a lot of long term side effects and lead to dependance, but instead you could use something very, very safe, like l-theanine, which comes from green tea. It's an amino acid that helps with anxiety. You could drink a cup of coffee or tea again, very safe. And these supplements are going to be safer than the alternative choice, which is a medication.

So for lots of reasons. And one more is that, sometimes we have no conventional medicine. Here's an example. Milk thistle is a dietary supplement that helps the liver with detoxification. So I write about if you're a recovering from surgery in the book, and having some milk thistle on hand can help you detoxify from all of the anesthetics that have been given. We have no such medicine that helps with that detoxification process.

Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson

So many people find that behavior change and lifestyle change is challenging. It's one of the biggest challenges. How do you approach this in your book and in integrative medicine in general?

Dr. Victoria Maizes

I agree that it is challenging, all of us can probably name something. For me it's meditation. I meditate, I'm good for a week or two, and then it somehow slips away. And so I think this is something that's part of us as humans that we we have good intention. And then for one reason or another, we fall off the path.

So the first thing I like to do is remind people that this is part of the human condition. And when you notice you've stopped with your good behavior, don't beat yourself up. Just start again. Just begin again. And that could be whether your age is meditation, like me, or whether your change is, in a healthy diet or a regular exercise habit.

So that's, I think, step one, we can be very self-critical. And I think it's nicer to be gentle with yourself and just say, oh, that thing and begin again. I often like to ask people about when they've made a successful change in the past and what they can learn from it. So, for example, if I want someone to exercise more than they are, I might say, is there a time when you've been a regular exerciser and they say, oh, yes, when I was on that soccer league, or oh, yes, I used to walk with my neighbor.

So could they do that again? It's more fun to play soccer, perhaps, than it is to go for a solitary walk every day. Or if you know that your neighbors, they're waiting for you at 7 a.m. outside in the cold, you're going to be more motivated to get out of bed and go for that walk. And then when you do that, it's good to celebrate your success.

You know, give yourself a little pat on the back, you know, acknowledge that you're doing a good job. We can frame things different. So, for example, rather than that critical self, you could say something like, well, I'm a person who exercises every day and that changes your self-image. Andy, do you have a tip.

Dr. Andrew Weil

I tell people to take it in small steps, but don't try to do a global change, because if you do it often, you give it up.

Dr. Victoria Maizes

Yeah, sometimes we make it too big. And so some of the people who have researched behavior change say, do the very smallest amount where you cannot fail. So for example, that could be one jumping jack, one push up, something that you just can't fail at. And then you can build upon your success in having that one. Every day I say to people, can you go for a five minute walk?

It could be at lunch, on a break with a friend. It could be in the end of the day, because often people tell me they just don't have time. Well, most of us can find five minutes, and we know that five minutes of exercise is ever so much better than zero exercise.

Dr. Andrew Weil

Good. Can you tell us a success story or two about patients you've dealt with who followed your advice?

Dr. Victoria Maizes

Yeah. I think I'm going to tell about a woman who followed, environmental advice. This was such a strange story. This is a woman who came to see me. She was having very heavy premenstrual, perimenopausal bleeding. And, she also was having these weird, painful bumps on the front of her shin. It's a fancy name called, erythema nodosum. And these two symptoms had, caused her to think could it be something with my hormones and she came to see me asking because she had had the bumps on her legs when she was pregnant as well. And as I talked to her, I, I took a careful history. I asked her a bunch of different questions  at the end of the visit said, well, let's do some blood work. We decided we'd do an ultrasound of her pelvis to see if she had uterine fibroids. But then I gave her this handout that I often use with patients that had different environmental tips. And we scheduled a phone call for two weeks later. And when I called her, the first words out of her mouth were “I figured it out” which I wanted just say often it is patients who figure it out. We have a short amount of time with our patients, and and it takes a little bit of sleuthing, of being a detective to figure out what that exposure might be, but she told me the story where she had hired an employee two weeks before the symptoms started, and the employee had brought in a plastic water kettle and every day boil the water and made coffee.

And my patient had started drinking coffee made from this plastic kettle. So after she had thought about environmental exposures, she started thinking, could it be the coffee pot? And she bought a stainless-steel kettle and a glass French press. So she still had coffee every day at three. She just no longer had it from the plastic kettle and all her symptoms went away.

Dr. Andrew Weil

That's pretty good.

Dr. Victoria Maizes

It's pretty good. But it's like. Really like, do you really believe that that is what caused it? Maybe it's just coincidence. And I think a lot of people are skeptical of that story. So I listened and, you know, if I was going to be a true scientist, I would have said, go back to drinking the coffee and the plastic and see if it comes back.

But I don't like to make people sick. So I did not do that instead. You know, I just was happy for her. And then a few months later, there was this article that came out that talked about how women who have these different environmental exposures suffer from early menopause 2 to 4 years earlier. And I thought, wow, that'll interest this patient.

She was an educated, patient. I thought she'll be interested in this. So I emailed it to her and she emails me back and she said, you know, I'm still way better than I ever was. But once I did eat one of those TV dinners that comes in plastic, I was good, I put the food in a glass bowl and I microwaved it, but then I zapped the plastic to get the sauce over, and I poured it over the food.

And an hour later I had a new erythema nodosum, some of my shin. So she sort of did it. She retested it. And I think this is an example of how often these environmental exposures are kind of invisible to us, unless we're really paying attention. Who would think that early menopause would be from this kind of plastic exposure?

Dr. Andrew Weil

Well, while, scientists might be skeptical of the connection we can't be skeptical about the rapid healing response. You know, her problem disappeared. And that's, you know, I think of great significance.

Dr. Victoria Maizes

And it's so satisfying. I mean, this is one of the wonderful things about practicing integrative medicine. And I think, all of the fellows that we train in our Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine Fellowship tell me stories like this. They talk about how, in their specialty, they now have people who had named the disease rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, things that are often thought to be irreversible, or permanent or chronic.

And lo and behold, their patients are getting better. It's an incredibly satisfying way to practice medicine.

Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson

I have one more question for you, because we rarely talk about this, and you talk about it in your book, which is, what recommendations do you have for people approaching surgery?

Dr. Victoria Maizes

I was really happy to be able to have a section, on, surgery in the book and I talk about preparing for surgery, the surgical experience, and recovering from surgery. There is so much that we could do to increase the odds that we will have a successful surgery with a more rapid recovery. For example, sometimes when people are going to surgery, they're not in great shape. They're a little frail. That's true. And people have to have heart surgery as an example. It is true when people are having orthopedic surgery because when they're having that knee or that hip replacement, which are often miraculous, they've sometimes gotten deconditioned because they have pain in their knee or their hip, and therefore they're not doing as much exercise and they have some muscle wasting.

And so for physical conditioning before surgery, going to your physical therapist, doing some strengthening, before heart surgery, walking, exercising. This is going to set you up for a better post-op recovery. But it's not just physical things. It's also the stress most people find going to surgery a stressful experience. So how do you mitigate stress? And we have evidence that doing guided imagery as an example, breathwork, as Andy mentioned earlier, these things help reduce the stress before surgery.

There are dietary supplements you can use. So for example, people who took a dose of melatonin the night before surgery lowered their need for opioids in their post-op recovery. People who gargled with licorice before surgery had less of the kind of sore throat that's very uncomfortable that people often have after they're intubated. Nausea. We have some really good anti-nausea medicines, but it turns out that just as effective having a little vial of essential oil with peppermint that works much faster because inhaling something works faster than taking it by mouth or even getting it intravenously.

So there's a whole host of things you could do from the Integrative Medicine Toolbox that will help you both prepare and recover.

Dr. Andrew Weil

It strikes me as well, odd and disappointing that so many physicians are pessimistic about the body's capacity for healing. And I think that's a consequence of our training, much of which occurs in hospitals where we see a skewed sample of the population. We see the very sick and, in that group, healing is less likely than in the general population.

I think the rule is that most diseases end by themselves as the body's healing response. But it is too bad that more doctors don't are not confident in the body's ability to heal, and are able to convey that to their patients.

Dr. Victoria Maizes

I agree, I just said, recently to a class of fellows, I was giving a talk about anxiety, and someone came up to me afterward and said, but don't you use, Valium, Adavan, you know, benzodiazepines and, I said, you know, those can be helpful. For example, before surgery, it can be very helpful to get some of that intravenously before your surgery.

Dr. Victoria Maizes

But you have to grow in your confidence that breathwork, that these dietary supplements, that physical activity, that mindfulness based stress reduction and so on, that these things actually work. And the good news is I, show them this in some of the studies. There are now studies that show that, mindfulness is as effective as the antidepressants. There was a study that showed running was just as effective as the antidepressant.

So the good news is, is that the body of evidence is increasing our ability to say with confidence these things work as well as and instead of side effects, they often have what we call side benefits. So when you run, instead of, taking a medication, you not only have less depressed mood, less anxiety, but you lose weight.

You lower your blood pressure, you feel better. And so I, I think we have to continue as teachers of integrative medicine to convey our confidence and to let people know that with time and experience, they will see the remarkable, synergistic effect of these therapies that enhance the body's natural healing abilities.

Dr. Andrew Weil

Well, I think your new book will be a very welcome, addition to the body of knowledge about innate healing. When will it be available?

Dr. Victoria Maizes

January 13th, 2026, comes out in the United States and in the UK.

Dr. Andrew Weil

Are you going to be doing, publicity for it.

Dr. Victoria Maizes

Podcasts like this one. Some articles. And I'm very happy to say that the AARP is collaborating with me. And so they have a lot of, articles and webinars coming out as well.

Dr. Andrew Weil

Great. And I will certainly tell friends and colleagues about the book.

Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson

I just really want to congratulate you on this. Victoria, this is an enormous body of work and it's going to be so useful. I heard myself make a joke the other day to our fellow saying, I wonder if this book's going to you know, take our jobs away from us because it’s so educational. But, I mean, that's what we want, right?

You've been saying that for a long time, and you know, once we get this out there, we won't have a job anymore. People will be healthy.

Dr. Andrew Weil

Well, thank you, Victoria, for being a guest instead of a host. And next time we will be co-hosts.

Dr. Victoria Maizes

Thank you. And thank you, Ann Marie.