Alberto Villoldo

Alberto Villoldo is a Cuban-born American medical anthropologist and author working at the intersection of indigenous Andean healing traditions and contemporary integrative medicine. Trained as a psychologist with a Ph.D. from Saybrook University, he spent decades conducting field research with shamans and curanderos in the high Andes of Peru and the Amazon basin, documenting healing practices that he later translated for North American audiences. He founded the Four Winds Society, a training organization that teaches what he calls "energy medicine" drawing on Q'ero and other Andean traditions, and through that school he has trained thousands of practitioners over more than thirty years. His teaching combines mainstream nutritional science, neuroscience-informed lifestyle medicine, and ceremonial practices adapted from his fieldwork. Villoldo is the author of more than fifteen books, including Shaman, Healer, Sage; Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval; The Four Insights; and One Spirit Medicine: Ancient Ways to Ultimate Wellness. One Spirit Medicine, published by Hay House in 2015, distilled his integrative-medicine framework into a practical program combining detoxification, dietary change, and contemplative practice, and reached a broad audience in the holistic-health market. His work has been the subject of both enthusiastic reception in integrative-health circles and skepticism in mainstream biomedical literature, and readers approach his books most productively understanding them as anthropological reporting and personal-practice instruction rather than peer-reviewed clinical research. He continues to lecture and lead expeditions to Peru, and his books remain in print across several languages.