Original title: Homeostasis: The Underappreciated and Far Too Often Ignored Central Organizing Principle of Physiology
HomeostasisThe body’s self-regulating process for maintaining internal stability while adapting to changes outside. is how the body keeps its insides within workable limits while the outside world changes. It does not mean the body stays exactly the same: internal conditions can shift to meet a challenge. Many regulating systems work together, and higher control centers can adjust them. The essay argues that health depends on this regulation, while disease can arise when it is disrupted.
Imagine keeping a meal warm while people keep opening the kitchen door on a cold day. The food will not stay at one exact temperature unless you adjust the heat as conditions change. In this paper, the kitchen’s changing conditions stand for the outside world, while adjusting the heat stands for the body’s many linked ways of keeping its internal conditions workable.
Homeostasis gives doctors and students a way to understand how the body’s systems work together, rather than treating each part in isolation. It also frames disease as a disruption of those regulating systems, and treatment as an effort to restore healthy conditions.
The abstract describes the essay’s account of homeostasis and its role in health and disease. It does not report new experiments, clinical evidence, or specific treatments, and it does not establish how particular disorders should be treated.
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Homeostasis: The Underappreciated and Far Too Often Ignored Central Organizing Principle of Physiology — George E. Billman — Frontiers in Physiology — doi:10.3389/fphys.2020.00200
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.