Common Sense Medicine
Posted on December 8, 2010 by admin
Common Sense Medicine ® is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to reforming our health care by looking at our current crisis in a new and different way. This is necessary because if we don’t see the problem differently we keep making the same mistakes over and over.
Our fundamental mistake is thinking that our system can be analyzed where we take it apart, look at the parts that make up the system, find the faulty one(s), fix them, and put the system back together, working like new. This has been the way we have dealt with problems ever since we joined together in groups larger than tribes. It’s the way we think; we look at something, find where it came from, what it does, and think we understand it.
The problem with this is that it doesn’t really reflect how the world works. Many things in the world around us are indeed this simple. Our computers are machines that work this way; they do the same thing over and over–they are predictable. We built them this way.
As you add elements to such simple systems they get more complex, and they become networked. At the same time they become less predictable. Like weather patterns the best way to predict what will happen is to use a simulation program that includes as many of the elements of the system as possible. We can’t do this in our heads; we need big computers.
Then if we take it a step further we come up with living organisms that are not only networked, but can read and adapt to their environments. And those environments can be on several levels. Bacteria do a very rapid job of adapting genetically to our antibiotics. Infants and small children rapidly adapt and grow their brains according to the pattern of their cultural environments. Wall Street bankers read and rapidly adapt to governmental regulations and are generally successful at finding ways to optimize their profits. Organisms that can adapt, on whatever scale they are working on, are not predictable–and that is the problem.
We want our actions to be right and proper, and to obtain this end we need predictability. But where it really matters, in our relationships with other people, we can’t know–people are not predictable. Yet in the practice of medicine the whole field is based on this need to know, so we make people into mechanical contrivances and statistically predict what our drugs will do. This approach is a monstrous affront to both our humanity and our adaptability, but nevertheless it is the basis of most of our actions today.
This does not mean that we need to dump all analytical information that we have gained about how the body and other living adaptive organisms work; there is a lot of information there. It means only that we need to recognize that this information does not give us any ability to always predict our actions as we try to manipulate our living environments; you can’t connect the dots into a meaningful picture when the dots themselves can adapt.
Common Sense Medicine® is established to try to change the way we think. We think this new model is recognizing that human beings, indeed all living organisms, are better seen as the adaptive organisms they in fact are. We are established to help fund research that sees human beings in this way. It is funded by royalties from the sales of our book, The Boids and the Bees: Guiding Adaptation to Improve our Health, Healthcare, Schools, and Society, where applications of this new way of thinking are described in many of our problematic systems. If you would like to help fund this endeavor we encourage you to purchase the book. If you have read the book and want to support this further please send a check to the address below. If you wish to follow up on what research we are funding please include your E-mail address.
JUST READ ABOUT XLEAR, AND CANNOT FIND LOCALLY. CAN YOU SELL
ME SOME AND WHAT IS PRICE ? I ASSUME THIS IS GOOD FOR SINUS
AND MUCUS PROBLEMS. PLEASE ADVISE. THANK YOU.
WE don’t sell anything. If you are looking for Xlear try going to xlear.com and entering your zip code. If you are not in the US you can buy from them online.
I completely agree with your statements. As a nurse of 23 years and a Nurse Practitioner for 14 of those years, I have witnessed the depersonaliztion of medicine. We have removed the key ingredient to a successful plan of care…the person. We never take the time in out task oriented system to ask patients and families what it is that they want, not what we have on our agenda.
This is what perpetuates the healthcare crisis. We need to open the dialogue with patients and families, provide them with information and allow them to make their decisions.