The Institute of Medicine was established by President Nixon in 1970. It is part of the American Academy of Sciences and its membership is taken from that prestigious group. It was formed to help find ways to make our health care system work better. More than thirty years later their report, Crossing the Quality Chasm, concludes that […]
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Introduction In writing this I can think of no better alternative then to follow the path I followed as I searched for why the spray I helped develop worked so well. That path is both chronological and topical, but it actually began long before we developed the spray when my wife, Jerry Bozeman, recognized that […]
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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 That is an old and outdated definition of health, but it persists.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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Medicare reform is shaping up to be the issue for our time. “We, the people,” like our bread buttered on both sides and we don’t like change. But Medicare is continuing to grow faster than we can afford. While retirees’ Social Security is fairly well covered for a few decades, Medicare is not; we do […]
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