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Medical Uses of Xylitol for Professionals
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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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 That is an old and outdated definition of health, but it persists.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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Medicare Reform?
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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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 […]
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