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Executive Summary
Modern health systems excel at managing acute disease yet struggle to generate durable health. Chronic illness, multimorbidity, escalating costs, and declining resilience reveal a structural failure rather than a technical one. Health has been misdefined.
This white paper advances a unified framework that resolves this failure by integrating two complementary bodies of work: John McMurtry’s life-ground axiology, which identifies the universal conditions required for life and value to exist, and the emerging science of intrinsic health, which defines health as a measurable, system-level capacity for robustness, plasticity, performance, and sustainability.
At the core of the framework is a simple but consequential insight: health, value, and solvency are different expressions of the same requirement — the preservation of adaptive freedom across time. When the conditions of life are coherent, intrinsic health is high, systems remain solvent, and value expands. When those conditions are violated, systems contract, defend, and eventually fail, regardless of intent or ideology.
Intrinsic health is presented as a field-like property of living systems, emerging from the interaction of three inseparable pillars: energy, communication, and structure. Mitochondria are identified as the central biological integrators of this process, mediating how environmental, social, and developmental conditions shape future health trajectories. Chronic disease is reframed as stabilized emergency metabolism under sustained constraint, while healing is understood as the restoration of reversibility and adaptive range.
The paper derives a set of universal design principles for long-horizon care, including preserving reversibility before maximizing control, optimizing adaptive range rather than peak performance, protecting biological rhythm, reducing background threat, favoring low-force multi-domain interventions, measuring recovery rather than suppression, and deliberately building slack. These principles scale seamlessly from cellular physiology to clinical practice, health system design, economic policy, and governance.
By aligning medicine, public health, ethics, and policy around the same biological constraints, this framework offers a disciplined, non-ideological basis for redesigning systems so that life can continue to breathe, adapt, and flourish over time.
