Coping with the Cold Season

One of our primary goals at Common Sense Medicine is to teach the value of our defenses and to explain that the bothersome symptoms they sometimes produce should not be ‘balanced’ with drugs to bring the body back into balance and therefore more healthy. That is an old and outdated definition of health, but it persists. Hobbling the defense […]

Read more

Coping with Antibiotic Resistance

Claude Bernard is reported as saying the he could eat Pasteur’s anthrax with impunity. Not many today have his nerve; we have gone down Pasteur’s pathway where the fearful germs are the focus, and all our efforts are aimed at destroying them. Following that path has led to much success, but also to a lot […]

Read more

Bacterial Infections and the Flu

We recently returned from a trip to find that a close friend had died in the week we were gone. From healthy to dead in a week is what we are sometimes seeing with the current flu. These deaths are reported to be associated with bacterial infections that appear only as the flu. Most of […]

Read more

Whatever Happened to Honoring Defenses?

This post is based on a presentation given in the Dupont Summit conference dealing with science and public policy at the Carnegie Institute of Science in Washington DC on December 7, 2012. The session was on complexity as a paradigm game changer. Understood was the fact that our thinking remains stuck in the mechanical model […]

Read more

Making Health Care Affordable

Saving American Health and Healthcare: A view from the margins. If Wendell Berry is right then we ought not to be looking to our temples of healing and learning for solutions to our health care problems. Real solutions require seeing the problems differently and that is hard for the experts. In the following we propose […]

Read more

How Blood-Letting Can Transform Medicine

Transformation is all about how we see ourselves in the world. We are stuck if we limit that view to the egos we have constructed over the course of our lives. Expanding that model is what all transformation is about. The model is a paradigm in Thomas Kuhn’s sense of the word; when it is […]

Read more

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

Michael Sandel’s new book by this title reopens an issue we covered in our book as it deals with health care and makes a much broader argument for the fact that there are lots of areas that are best dealt with outside of the marketplace. In slavery people were for sale, and we don’t have […]

Read more
*Insurance is designed to pay for the unexpected crisis. Health insurance started that way in the U.S. but gradually, because the companies we work for were paying for it and getting a better tax break, it morphed into paying for it all. That means we have less interest in getting the ounce of prevention than if we were paying for some of those costs. Children we talk to about the dangers of drugs just say they’ll get a brain transplant if they burn theirs out. That’s why we think that Health Savings Accounts should be promoted by the government more; they put the individual back in a position of responsibility in making more choices in their health care. With Health Savings Accounts an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.


Disclaimer: All material provided in this web site is provided for educational purposes in the hope of improving our general health. Access of this web site does not create a doctor-patient relationship nor should the information contained on this web site be considered specific medical advice with respect to a specific patient and/or a specific condition. Copy sections of this page and discuss them with your physician to see if they apply to your own symptoms or medical condition.

Dr. Jones specifically disclaims any liability, loss or risk, personal or otherwise, that is or may be incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of use or application of any of the information provided on this web site.

Copyright © 2014 Common Sense Medicine - Designed By Sebo Marketing