A Love Letter to Five

OR: How do I love thee? let me count the ways!

by David E. McCarty MD FAASM (…but you can call me Dave) 

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“The things we love tell us what we are.”

--attributed to Sir Thomas Aquinas

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A book my big sister gave me about four years ago…

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Part I — The Awakening: Meeting the Living Number

(Physical Healing: The first stirring of life)

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Dear Five,

I’ve been meaning to write you for some time now.

You, who live halfway between order and chaos.

You, the restless hinge between the square and the sphere.

You, the jazz note that made the metronome sweat.

Ghost in the machine…

It’s easy to forget how alive a number can be until one of them steps off the page and starts dancing. You, Five, are that dancer. Not the perfect geometry of Three or the grand symmetry of Four, but the one who shows up barefoot, pockets full of seashells, talking fast about balance, motion, and the wild heartbeat of the human condition.

I’ve spent a lifetime inside the machines of medicine--machines that adore counting. We count events per hour, breaths per minute, milligrams per kilogram. But every so often, amidst the sterilized arithmetic, a number slips through the bars and starts singing about meaning. That’s you, Five.

When we imagined Rebis, you began showing up everywhere. Five Reasons. Five Fingers. Five Dimensions of Healing. You became the hidden architecture of the whole thing. I thought it was coincidence at first. Now I know better. You were always waiting.

Maybe it’s no accident. Numerologists say you can reduce your birthdate to a single digit—a kind of harmonic fingerprint. When I first did the math for mine—September 17, 1968—the sum came to Five. I laughed when I saw it—of course it did!! It was love at first sight, like attracting like. Of course I’d spend my life trying to translate complexity into motion, to help medicine remember how to breathe.

Maybe Five, you didn’t just find me.

Maybe I was born humming your frequency…

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Part II — The Geometry of Humanity

(Cognitive Healing: Understanding the pattern)

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In the beginning there was One—unity, undivided. Then came Two—polarity, the primal split. Three arose as reconciliation, the first triangle. Four built the house, the square, the stable world.

And then came you, Five, whispering: What if the house could breathe?

The Pythagoreans called you the human number—one head, two arms, two legs—a living pentagram that walks between heaven and earth. Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man was your portrait: limbs splayed in holy proportion, inscribed in circle and square. You, Five, are the bridge between the finite and the infinite.

In the old cosmologies, the world was made of four elements—earth, air, fire, water—and a mysterious fifth: the quinta essentia, the ether, the unseen breath that holds the other four together. From you we get the word quintessential—that which carries the soul of things.

To love you, Five, is to love movement itself. You are the interval, the modulation, the unpredictable grace note that keeps the song alive. Even rock ’n’ roll remembers your secret.

There were four Beatles and five Rolling Stones. The Beatles built cathedrals of melody—the perfect square of pop—while the Stones rolled in with an extra limb, that fifth, defiant spark of swing and sin. One was celestial order; the other, kinetic survival. I sometimes think that’s the whole story of human rhythm right there: four beats hold the song together, but the fifth is what makes it dance. 

You remind us that order without motion is death.

 Thank you.

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Part III — The Trickster in the Clinic

(Emotional Healing: Rediscovering joy, curiosity, and humility)

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Five, my friend, you’ve always had a trickster streak!

You don’t stay where you’re put. When I map the Empowered Sleep Apnea universe, I can feel you fluttering between the parts—laughing from the margins like a crow on a telephone wire.

Maybe that’s why I think of you as the Hermes number — messenger, boundary-crosser, interpreter between worlds.

You are the handshake between the seen and the unseen.

The symbol for change that somehow holds continuity.

The arithmetic of grace.

Five, how we need you! 

Because medicine has become so fond of its Fours--its checklists, protocols, quadrants, and guidelines. Everything boxed, rational, insured. But boxes cannot breathe. They need a fifth thing: a window.

And you are that window.

Thank you!

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Part IV — The Triple Manifestations of Five

(Relational Healing: How Five shows up between people, ideas, and systems)

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1. The Five Reasons to Treat

The Five Reasons to Treat grew out of exhaustion — my own and everyone else’s. We’d spent decades talking about CPAP as if it were a machine for fixing numbers, when in truth it was a conversation about meaning. Why are we doing this? You gave me a way to bring that conversation back to life.

You stepped forward then, Five, as if to say: “Let’s make it human again.”

You became the architecture of motivation itself—our very Reasons to Treat: RISK, SNORING, SLEEP, WAKE, and COMORBIDITIES. Not a checklist, but a story arc: from fear to relief, from symptom to wholeness.

You turned medicine’s linear question--Is the AHI fixed?—into a spiral question: Is the person healing?

Every time I teach it, I can feel your pulse behind the words.

Five columns supporting the monument of complexity, five steps allowing a stable structure for meaningful co-discovery…

Patients see those five steps, and something clicks — not because they memorize the list, but because the list has music.

In 5/4 time, like Brubeck’s “Take Five,” Five, your music swings!

2. The Five Finger Approach

Then came your second incarnation added to the Empowered Sleep Apnea project: the Five Finger Approach.

I wanted to teach clinicians how to see the whole patient without drowning in detail. I wanted to set up some stars to sail by, instead of an outdated map made by folks who’d not been to sea. Sleep medicine had fractured into a thousand sub-disciplines, you know?...each clutching its data like a separate kingdom. What we needed was a hand — something that could hold all of it at once.

And, Five…there you were again! Five fingers, one palm.

Each finger a domain to explore, allowing shared co-discovery of trajectories toward healing:

1. Thumb: Circadian Misalignment

2. Index Finger: Pharmacologic Factors

3. Middle Finger: Medical Factors

4. Ring Finger: Psychiatric/Psychosocial Factors

5. Pinky: Primary sleep diagnoses

Together, Five, you formed the anatomy of clarity. A scaffolding for shared co-discovery, with the patient’s narrative front and center.

When a provider learns to see through the Five Fingers, the conversation shifts from “What’s the diagnosis?” to “What’s the story?” From “What pill should we try?” to “Let’s identify root causes for your problem!”

Five, you showed us that the hand of medicine is not for control--it’s for touch. The patient is not an object; they are a field of relationships. The fingers work together or not at all.

You turned a protocol into a conversation, a diagnosis code into choreography.

3. The Five Dimensions of Healing

And then, just when I thought you’d had enough stage time, you appeared one more time — this time with your most cosmic flourish, the one that unifies it all…

As we found ourselves exploring integrative medicine ethos through Rebis, we find ourselves calling attention to the Five Dimensions of Healing:

Physical, Cognitive, Emotional, Relational, Spiritual. 

It wasn’t a list we planned; it was one we remembered. Because healing doesn’t happen in one dimension at a time. It ripples through layers, like concentric waves after a stone is dropped. You, Five, are the geometry of those ripples.

Physical healing--the body mending itself.

Cognitive healing--the mind finding coherence.

Emotional healing--the heart returning to trust.

Relational healing--the space between us becoming safe again.

Spiritual healing--the reunion with meaning itself.

Five, you taught me that medicine’s mistake was not cruelty—it was dimensional reduction. We’ve tried so hard to address only one layer at a time, but life moves in fivefold spirals. When all five dimensions align, a sixth field emerges—what I call Cultural Healing—when the system itself begins to remember wholeness.

And once again, there you were at the center, laughing: “You see? I’m not a number. I’m a rhythm.”

Thank you!

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Part V — The Dance and the Benediction

(Spiritual Healing: Integration and return to wholeness)

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You’re not an integer, Five. You’re a verb.

To “Five” something is to bring it to life—to open the window, to restore movement where there was stagnation. You are the frequency of integration through dynamism.

That’s why you appear everywhere in the body: five digits, five senses, a Vitruvian man in a five-pointed star. You are woven into the architecture of breath and perception.

You remind us that we heal not by fixing, but by moving through.

Of course, every archetype has its shadow. Yours is restlessness--the temptation to scatter, to chase novelty, to never finish the song. You can be a trickster, a seductive wanderer. You whisper, “Change is good,” and sometimes we believe you too easily.

But I forgive you for that. Because in a world addicted to stasis, your restlessness is a kind of mercy. You keep us from calcifying.

The secret, I’ve learned, is not to resist your motion but to dance with it. To let curiosity mature into coherence. To let exploration spiral back into embodiment.

 That’s the discipline of Five: to remain curious and connected. To wander without getting lost.

I find that I draw you a lot, Five, in the five-pointed stars that appear everywhere in my cartoons, you’re a geometry that feels both ancient and alive. You illuminate my “happy e” of empowerment, blasting off into space, reminding us that empowerment is motion.

You are the Rebis number because you hold opposites in living tension: Masculine and feminine. Order and freedom. Knowledge and wonder. Science and soul.

When we built you into the Rebis system, we didn’t invent that integration--we just noticed your fingerprints on everything.

Five is the number of the both/and world--the one where crows teach crows, where doctors become listeners, and where healing energy is allowed to flow in both directions.

So here’s to you, Five--you glorious, fidgeting, human number. The heartbeat in the metronome. The spark in the stethoscope. The crow’s caw echoing off the columns of the Five Reasons Monument.

You are the space between inhale and exhale--the place where structure dissolves into song.

Everywhere I look, you’re reminding me:

Don’t build checklists to follow…build ISLANDS to explore!

And I think maybe that’s what healing is--not perfection, but participation.

Not arriving…but staying in the dance.

So thank you, Five, for teaching me how to dance again. For sneaking into my models and making them alive. For holding the bridge between data and devotion, science and soul.

You are the architecture of wonder, the signature of life in motion.

If I could leave one engraving at the base of the Five Reasons Monument, it would simply say:

To Five, my friend, the living number that turned medicine back into music.

With love and boundless admiration,

Dave

David E McCarty MD FAASM

Longmont Colorado

22 October 2025

Dave is the co-creator (with Ellen Stothard, PhD) of the Empowered Sleep Apnea project and the Chief Medical Officer of Rebis Health.