Reworking America’s Healthcare System looks at what works and much of it comes from past lessons.

The first lesson came with my graduate degree in the history of science and ideas. Our current healthcare system largely came from Louis Pasteur and his germ theory interacting with the old humoral system that focused on treating symptoms. He showed us how germs cause many of our diseases and began our battle to overcome them—mostly by killing them. But microbes are not the weak microscopic organisms he portrayed. They are more like the Titans of life on this earth, and our battle is a Cosmic one we have little chance of winning.

Microbes are the earliest form of life and for more than two billion years they were the only life. They learned how to adapt to, as well as how to change their environment to produce diversity in their species as well as the diversity surrounding us. And they learned how to protect themselves from environmental threats—like our antibiotics. Antibiotic resistant microbes play a part in close to five million annual deaths, and the prediction is an increase of 70% by 2050 if we don’t do something different.

That something else is found in Pasteur’s colleague, Claude Bernard—the father of modern physiology—who recognized the differing resilience of the people he studied and argued with Pasteur that those differences were equally responsible for who got sick. Those differences are housed in the variety of defenses that evolution has provided us with—we have them by natural selection because they work, but we have largely ignored them.

Indeed, western medicine retained the focus on treating symptoms and has mis-identified many of our back-up defenses as aberrant symptoms and developed drugs to treat them. Bloodletting has the position of honor here since it lasted for nearly three thousand years. It was used to treat the excess of blood seen in our primary defense for injury and infection, the inflammatory response, and was still used in the flu epidemic a century ago.

This defense splints injuries internally and marshals blood-borne agents to fight infection. But for our ancestors the symptoms of redness, swelling, fever and pain marked the excess of blood and vigorous bloodletting induces shock, which reverses all the symptoms. When the focus is on symptoms and bloodletting reverses all of them, it is little wonder it lasted as long as it did.

But the emphasis on symptoms was carried on by our scientific medicine. A fever is part of the inflammatory response, but we still cripple its benefits. We use steroids to cripple the pain of inflammation and a variety of drugs to deal with the washing defense of gastroenteritis. We need to turn this around so that we honor and support our defenses instead of crippling them. They are there because they work to keep us healthy.

I learned all this in graduate school, not in medical school. I began practicing around the same time we were learning the benefits of Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) in treating cholera.

My colleagues saw ORT as a cheap way for Third World countries to help cholera victims. I saw it as a way to help our GI tract’s washing defense by simply keeping our fluid tanks full. ORT uses the sodium-glucose transport system in the upper GI tract to pump water into the

body. In the ER, where I used it, it costs about a quarter and saves a few hundred dollars—the cost of an IV.

But it’s in the defenses of our respiratory tract that the main picture lies. Respiratory infections are the most common type of infection, and they include the flu and most of our other epidemics. And when they cost us trillions of dollars, we need to pay attention to the defense that can stop them.

Twenty-seven years ago, our six-month-old granddaughter began having chronic ear infections. Her grandmother, my wife Jerry, was a special ed teacher who—in looking at her students’ medical records—saw a connection between early ear infections and her students. Several years later that connection was confirmed at dinner with Jerome Klein, co-author with Charles Bluestone of the standard textbook on the subject, Otitis Media in Infants and Children. At the end of dinner, he looked at me and said: “You tell everyone you talk to that this Jerry agrees with your Jerry.”

That connection and agreement is due to two factors: every infection is accompanied by the fluid that tries to wash it out and when recurrent it thickens and turns into glue, preventing the small bones in the middle ear from carrying the vibrations of the ear drum to the brain, and; secondly, the developmental window, the period of time when the brain is most able to learn the sounds that make up our languages, begins at about three months before birth and extends to about two years of age, which includes the timing of early otitis.

With a granddaughter heading down this path Jerry was desperate. She told me: “If you really cared about kids, you would find a way to prevent ear infections.” As fortune would have it Finnish researchers had found a benefit reducing ear infections by chewing xylitol gum which was published in the British Medical Journal three months before our granddaughter was born that I discovered shortly after Jerry’s mandate. They found a forty percent drop in otitis—but a six-month-old can’t chew gum.

That’s when my premed education came to the rescue. If our airway defenses were working properly, we would not have a problem. The microbes causing those infections live, or begin, in the back of the nose, same with sinus infections and most other respiratory infections like the flu and COVID, so, we put it there in a saline nasal spray at every diaper change. No more ear infections.

I used it on other kids and followed ten of them for a year showing a 95% lessening of their infections over the prior year. I used it for other respiratory problems—like asthma—and saw similar benefits. I had discovered how to optimize our airway defenses.

The Finnish authors said the xylitol worked on the microbes. They thought, like the dentists there, that the benefit came from the microbes not being able to digest five carbon sugars. That’s true, and it’s a benefit, but a subsequent study they did showed that when xylitol was exposed to the pharyngeal cells in their laboratory it was just as effective in reducing the microbial adherence as when exposed to the microbes. That finding is not consistent with microbial indigestion; it argues for an interface reason between both the host and the microbe, which brings us to Bill Costerton.

Costerton was the microbiologist who taught us about biofilms, the protective envelopes threatened microbes build around their colonies to keep them safe. Many recurrent ear

infections are thought to originate in biofilms; when exposed to antibiotics the microbes retire to their safe house only to come out again when the coast is clear.

In 1978, Costerton wrote “How bacteria stick,” in the January issue of Scientific American. In it he describes the glycocalyx, the long chains of sugar molecules and their complexes that coat all our cells and most proteins. Made up of a family of nine glycans they act as the glue between those on our cellular surfaces and those on the microbes.

He also proposed creating drugs that would compete with this binding process and stated that dealing with infections in this way would not promote the resistance we see with the use of global poisons like our antibiotics. He did not see it, but sugar alcohols do this competing. They are the same molecules but for an added hydrogen atom as the glycans, and xylitol, for one, is also flexible, which adds to its mimetic ability.

It has been shown in the lab and in clinical studies to retard the adherence of many different microbes including Streptococcal species, H1N1 flu, and the SARS-CoV-2 behind COVID.

The problem is that it is not a drug. Back when I first began playing with xylitol, I thought the FDA would be interested so I called them. It went something like this: ”I have a very good way to help clean our noses.” ”We don’t have a category for nose cleaning. What does that do?” ”It prevents ear and sinus infections and helps allergies and asthma.” ”Then it’s a drug and you need to register it as an IND, (“Investigational New Drug”).

I soon found out how many millions of dollars that would cost and realized that people everywhere could do what I did and make this spray in their kitchen, much like what my hospital pharmacy did.

The millions I would spend would have to come from my own pocket, and would not likely be repaid, especially if I had to charge pharmaceutical prices to cover those FDA expenses. The pharmaceutical industry agreed on the value of my idea; but they too were well aware of the problem and not interested. The nasal spray that resulted is called Xlear® (pronounced with a Finnish X to honor both their earlier research as well as xylitol, which they pronounce as ‘Khulitol’, so Xlear sounds like ‘clear’); it’s sold as a nose wash with no drug claims.

I call it a Hippocratic drug because he told us our foods should be our drugs. After my financial awakening, when I spoke again with the FDA about withdrawing my IND, they spoke of their impression of my safety explanation.

Drug safety is an issue needing generational animal studies looking at life expectancy—not new symptoms. I told them that 10% of the dry weight of a plum is xylitol, and that a person could use the spray every hour, both nostrils, 24 hours a day, and get about half a plum’s worth of xylitol, which is not absorbed nasally but delivered with the mucus to the stomach—just like the plum.

But to put that in the molecular perspective needed to deal with millions of microbial invaders, onespray delivers about a billion, billions (10*18) of xylitol molecules to the nose where they compete with their adherence to us. This discovery opened the door for me to the value of supporting and honoring all of our evolutionary defenses. I saw our defenses where no one else did.

Paul Ewald, author of Evolution of Infectious Disease, wrote about all of the physical means we have to prevent the spread of infectious microbes showing that they pushed the microbes toward a friendlier pathway — just as our own defenses do, without ever recognizing them as defenses.

And A.V. Arundel, wrote about how humidity affects the microbes and elements that contribute to our respiratory complaints without ever realizing he was showing us how to optimize that defense by his inclusion of an incidental fact: while high humidity had no adverse effect on microbes there were “insufficient respiratory infections to report when the humidity was greater than 50% R.H.” And the ‘insufficient respiratory infections’ include things like the flu and COVID.

Defense medicine is a new paradigm they did not see, and as Thomas Kuhn wrote on that subject, new paradigms open windows for new visions, and that is what our healthcare system needs.

About Dr. Lon Jones

Dr. Jones is a board-certified Osteopathic family physician. He is interested in what works and has had plenty of experience with things that don’t. Dr. Jones, with Jerry Bozeman, his colleague and wife, developed a nasal spray made up of xylitol and saline that assists and stimulates the immune system’s efforts to clean the nose. When used regularly, a clean nose prevents many of the medical problems that originate there. This includes allergies and asthma, as well as ear and sinus infections.

More information on this product, as well as the other uses of xylitol, is available at www.nasal-xylitol.com, or at his web site, commonsensemedicine.org, or in their books: No More Allergies, Asthma, or Sinus Infections, published by Freedom Press in 2010, and The Boids and the Bees: Guiding Adaptation to Improve our Health, Healthcare, Schools, and Society, published by Emergent Publications (where a 20% discount is still available).

His most recent books are both titled Common Sense Medicine, with subtitles, “Healing the body from the inside out. . .”, about how to support all of our defenses (2023), and “Making America Healthy Again”, about the benefits of seeing the elements behind our own health and their reflection in our social defenses, and applying them there (2024). Jones’s peer reviewed article describing his early experience is available here.

Before studying medicine, Dr. Jones spent 6 years in college and graduate school studying history, with a special interest on the history of science and ideas. He is confident that his background has influenced the way that he approaches health care, and the practice of medicine.