Introduction

Welcome to Michael Rose’s 55, an overarching context that will enable you to use nature’s rules to make sense of your health and take action to make your life much better.

You will do this by changing how you live. Not as a result of yet another fad but as the result of knowing the scientific context. You will be the agency of your own health.

Want to know more – go here. Deeper still – Go here

The full text online is here – A PDF that you can download and read offline is here.

Up until now, for most of us, medicine has been the controlling authority of health.  And that medicine has been reductionist and simplistic.  For that is how physicians have been trained to see the human body.  The connections between the parts got lost in the desire to find simple-minded answers in the parts. Connections between people and their environment were obscured because of the medical-industrial focus on parts, and their mechanical explanation.

In this machine world of crude control, the vast and subtle networks that underpin biology have been ignored and trampled.  Everything was made simple for only the simple could be controlled. Everything had to be explained by simple conveyor-belt pathways, and treated accordingly.  To be healthy, we were told, we had to become compliant patients, we had to give up on our true human nature.

To do well in the medical-industrial world, we had to take drugs and suffer mutilating surgeries, even for the most trivial problems.  If you are diabetic, take insulin.  Wrinkles and sags, get cosmetic surgery.  Uncontrollable appetite, bariatric surgery.  A diagnosis of heart disease is treated first with drugs, then bypass surgery, and finally a transplant.

But the new biology of our time, born circa the year 2000, is showing that this brutal style of medicine is not just inefficient.  It is in fact directly contrary to the subtle networks that sustain life itself.  It violates our evolutionary history, and it rapes the health that evolution gave us.

Just as Einstein and the modern physicists banished simple-minded physics, 21^st Century biology is demolishing the crudely mechanistic thought of molecular biology.  In its place we now see glittering webs of life.  And these webs are not just mystical objects fit only for worship.  Rather they are the very stuff from which the new sciences of life are being spun.

Using the 55, we will show you how you can use the new biology to take a better approach to your health, to your body, and to the way you live in the world.  From this new way, you will find the comfort and the understanding that you used to give up when you entered the clinics and the hospitals that have been the temples of the reductionist thuggery of the 20^th Century medical-industrial complex.

The Theses begin here at #1 – before then is a series of supporting posts.

PS – And the masthead picture is the Beagle arriving at the Galapagos
PPS Here is David Brooks expanding on Michael’s context