What would make the Missing Bridge framework clear, testable and useful in practice? This Critique accompanies the applied paper with questions about causal claims, workable measures, institutional responsibility and the difference between failed delivery and a failed explanation. Read More
How can we move from treating repeated harm to changing the conditions that produce it? This Deep Dive accompanies Bichara Sahely’s applied framework, connecting housing, food, work, education, ecology and finance with care, recovery and accountable change. Read More
Can the Missing Bridge become easier to understand without losing its causal discipline? This constructive critique examines the framework’s language, five guiding questions, practical usability and safeguards against metaphor, reductionism and self-confirming explanation. Read More
How can statutes, credit systems and institutional rules become embodied without confusing social arrangements with biological mechanisms? This debate tests the causal bridge linking rules to living conditions, load, capacity, regulation, repair and future life-capacity. Read More
What if our institutions measured success by the life-capacity they protect and enlarge rather than by money, output or activity alone? This Deep Dive follows the five-step causal bridge from rules and conditions through load, capacity, margin, regulation and repair to future life-capacity. Read More
Modern societies are exceptionally good at measuring money, output, risk and performance.
They are much less consistent at asking a more basic question: what do our rules and institutions do to the conditions that make life possible? A three-essay inquiry published in 2017 first approached the problem from three directions – environmental conditions, credit and institutional selection, and the embodied consequences of disconnection and chronic stress. The missing bridge is the method that now joins those insights without turning them into a single metaphor or a closed theory.
What happens when excellent medical care is not enough to produce health? This Deep Dive explores the life-grounded healing framework, moving from cellular repair and clinical competence to housing, institutions, justice, and planetary health — and asks what it would take to build systems in which healing can actually be completed. Read More
Is Life-Grounding CanMEDS intellectually compelling but too conceptually dense for the people expected to implement it? This Critique examines three potential weaknesses in the framework: its steep theoretical entry point, its reliance on deliberation in the face of concentrated political and commercial power, and whether its structure sufficiently communicates the urgency of the CanMEDS 2026 opportunity. Read More
Should CanMEDS explicitly orient medical competence toward protecting and restoring life-capacity—or would doing so burden physicians with social, structural, and ecological responsibilities they lack the power to address? This debate tests both sides of the Life-Ground Lens proposed in Life-Grounding CanMEDS, examining biomedical expertise, structural violence, moral distress, institutional reform, and the limits of professional responsibility. Read More
What happens when a healthcare system succeeds by every metric it measures while patients, clinicians, and communities become less healthy? This Deep Dive explores Life-Grounding CanMEDS and its diagnosis of operational contraction, institutional inversion, and the danger of mistaking throughput, efficiency, and fiscal performance for the purposes healthcare exists to serve. Read More
