More and more we are learning that bacteria are not all enemies. There are good bacteria; ten times more bacteria living on us and in us than we have cells and mostly they are good. Bacteria are the unquestioned masters of life on earth, both in durability and variety. As one doctor put it, we […]
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I just finished reading Lee Kuan Yew’s book, One Man’s View of the World. I read it because I knew a bit about how Lee had been instrumental in building Singapore into one of the best societies in today’s world. Lee, who died earlier this year, was a conservative. I consider myself a liberal in […]
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There is information everywhere you look today about our problem with antibiotic resistance and the only solution seen is more antibiotics. The July 2015 issue of Consumer Reports has the first of a three part series on the subject. President Obama announced his program in that area last March; one commentator for that announcement called […]
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On November 24th last year (2014) Kristen wrote to Dr. Axe (at DrAxe.com) asking what the xylitol in her nasal spray did. Dr. Axe hasn’t answered. Two years ago a California researcher sent e-mails to several hundred users of this nasal spray asking why they took it. Most of the responses had to do […]
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Bacteria have a sweet tooth; feeding them the right sugars makes for friendlier adaptation, reduces the need for antibiotics, and can help solve our problem of antibiotic resistant microbes. A.H. ‘Lon’ Jones DO Common Sense Medicine Living things adapt; itʼs part of the definition of life. They adapt to changes in their environments; and they […]
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In our book, The Boids and the Bees: Guiding Adaptation to Improve our Health, Healthcare, Schools and Society, we described what we thought was the best health care system in the world. Our guiding principle was helping people make good decisions about their care and giving them the financial power to implement those decisions. The key to the […]
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There has been an increase in chatter about our health care system recently, The Senate held hearings in February on revising Medicare and there have been several comments in JAMA in this vein. The diagram above represents the solution proposed by Michael Porter and Thomas Lee in the Harvard Business Review under the title of “Why Health […]
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Last year the Organization of the American States (OAS) had a conference that dealt largely with our drug problems and the violence associated with them. It was easy for the conferees to see that the root of the problem was all of the money pumped into this system by purchasers in the U.S. It was […]
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The authoritative news is that we are safe from outside attacks because we have a good system. But, like our military that always seems to be fighting the last war, our authorities seem to be ignoring the abilities our pathogens have to adapt. We are told, for example, that ebola is not transmitted from a […]
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I just learned about Cyborg science the other day. The phrase comes from the book, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, by Philip Mirowski. A cyborg is a combination of man and machine. It’s a good term to describe how common it is for ‘scientists’ to use mathematics to describe, influence, and exert control over […]
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