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Dr. Victoria Maizes is not sure when or even why a career in public health first appeared on her personal chart.

“There were no doctors in my family,” she said with a laugh last week. “Going to the doctor's office scared me as much as any kid I knew.”

Luckily for all of us, she got over it.

Now in her 28th year at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, Dr. Maizes has helped train thousands of physicians, and with a new book — — she is bringing some of those same lessons straight to patients themselves.

Released Jan. 13 by Simon & Schuster, “Heal Faster” looks at a variety of health conditions and challenges, from acid reflux and acne to heart disease and chronic depression. In each case, Dr. Maizes suggests things we might do to complement conventional treatment.

There is also a section that looks at ways patients might “pre-hab” and re-hab from surgery to make the experience more bearable and the outcome more successful.

“The biggest reason for the book was that I wanted people to know how much they can do to recover faster and more completely, no matter what condition they have,” Dr. Maizes said. “Modern medicines can be miraculous, no doubt about it, but our own bodies can do miraculous things, too, if we just give them a chance.”

Dr. Maizes is board-certified in Family Medicine and Integrative Medicine, an approach that combines conventional treatment — such as prescriptions and surgery — with evidence-based therapies, nutritional supplements and possible lifestyle changes to achieve better outcomes.

“An example might be someone who has received a severe diagnosis, even a cancer diagnosis,” she said. “They’ve decided on conventional treatment, and now they’re wondering what else they can do. That’s what integrative medicine is all about. The ‘what else can I do?’”

Chronic back pain? Dr. Maizes suggests you might try low-dose naltrexone (LDN) and look into a set of exercises called the Gokhale technique, which includes walking backwards.

Trouble sleeping? Low-strength melatonin might be a place to start, but eating earlier and avoiding that 10 o’clock nightcap will help, too.

Heart disease? Patients following the Ornish Diet and a prescribed exercise routine often see a significant reduction in blockages and chest pain, she says.

A summa cum laude graduate of Barnard College in New York City, Dr. Maizes earned an M.D. at UC San Francisco and completed her residency at the University of Missouri, focused on family medicine.

She was a chief of strategic education at Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa, California, when she began hearing about Dr. Weil’s new medical initiative in Tucson.

“My job in Santa Rosa was a combination of patient education and physician education, but as the treadmill of medicine got faster and faster, I realized I didn’t want to practice fast medicine,” she recalled. “I wanted to find the roots of what’s causing this one patient not to be well.”

The more she learned about integrative medicine, the more she was drawn to it, and in 1998, she saw that Dr. Weil was starting a new fellowship program out of the UA’s College of Public Health.

“The idea of a fellowship didn’t make much sense, really. I’d been a doctor nine years. I had a husband and kids, but Dr. Weil’s mission and my mission were so well aligned I just needed to be here.”

Dr. Maizes was named the program’s executive director the following year, and the Center for Integrative Medicine has been growing both in size and stature ever since.

“It’s all been incredibly rewarding, knowing I’ve helped train thousands of doctors who care for millions of people,” she said. “We’ve worked with primary care docs, pediatricians, urologists, OB-GYNs … We’re touching the lives of people all over the world, and I’m hoping the book will help us reach even more.”

The first seeds for “Heal Faster” were planted four years ago, when the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) called.

“They thought it was time for a new look at health care, and I might be a good person to write it,” Dr. Maizes recalled. “They said they’d support me any way they could. They’d help market the book when it was done. Knowing AARP was involved, I was pretty interested right from the start.”

Within a year, she had a contract with Simon & Schuster, and work began in earnest.

“The hardest thing was narrowing down the list of things I wanted to write about,” Dr. Maizes said. “I had my own stories. I had patient stories. I had interviews with surgeons and specialists. There were so many conditions to choose from. In the end, I focused on things where we had significant evidence that integrative medicine had made a difference.”

Hopefully, she said, the book might make a difference, too.

“My goal from the beginning was to give people a sense of hope they can recover from this thing they have, whatever it is,” she said. “If I’ve done that … “

It will have been just what the doctor ordered.

Footnotes

• Dr. Maizes is among the 300 authors who will be featured at next month’s Tucson Festival of Books. The entire schedule of author presentations is now accessible on the festival website: . The festival will be March 14-15 at the University of Arizona.
• The semifinals of this year’s Poetry Out Loud competition for Arizona high schoolers will take place next Saturday, Feb. 14, at the UA Poetry Center. Competition will begin at 1 p.m. Winners will advance to the statewide finals March 7. To learn more, visit .
• The next Tuesday night Book Club will feature author TC Tolbert in a discussion of Torrey Peters’ “Transition, Baby” on Tuesday, Feb. 17. The program will begin at 7 p.m. at Crooked Tooth Brewing Co. on East Sixth Street.
• A pub party for Tucson author Sarah T. Dubb and her newest book, “Honey Bee Mine,” will be celebrated Saturday, Feb. 21, at Stacks Book Club in Oro Valley. Tickets and additional information about the 6:30 p.m. event can be found at .