Life-Coherent Medicine: Healing the Organism in the Worlds We Conserve proposes an integrative clinical and public-health framework that places disease, treatment, healing, prevention, and policy within the organism–niche relation. It defines health as life-capacity enabled, healing as life-capacity restored, and flourishing as life-capacity expressed through dignity, relation, meaning, participation, and ecological belonging.
The book distinguishes salugenesis, the organism’s inner biology of healing completion, from salutogenesis, the outer field of health-generating conditions. It argues that health is sustained when exposure remains within restorative capacity and that disease, distress, dysfunction, and breakdown become more likely when cumulative exposure exceeds repair and margins collapse.
The framework is applied to immune disease as maladaptive phase-locking, neuropsychiatric disease as disturbed living coherence, noncommunicable diseases as conserved organism–niche miscouplings, and multimorbidity as layered miscoupling. Clinical practice is reframed through diagnosis as coherence assessment, the clinical encounter as structural coupling, treatment as protection-repair-re-entry, minimum sufficient force, and the CARE method: Contextualize, Assess, Re-open, Embed and Evaluate.
At the systems level, the book presents primary care as relational infrastructure, public health as niche repair, civil commons as health infrastructure, dashboards as instruments that should serve life, and Caribbean/SIDS medicine as a place-based test case for life-coherent practice. The final sections establish safeguards against anti-biomedical misuse, patient blame, vague holism, overreach, and unsupported claims, while proposing a research agenda for testing and refining life-coherent medicine.
The central claim is that medicine becomes life-coherent when it remains scientifically disciplined while becoming answerable to the living capacities it exists to protect.
