What’s New in Hormone Replacement Therapy and Environmental Endocrinology
The latest trend today in the field of medicine is environmental endocrinology - this is the branch of medicine that covers how stressors on multiple endocrine systems control aging and the quality of life. Environmental endocrinology addresses the effect of daily stressors such as light, food and crowding on multiple endocrine systems and they, in turn, control the aging and quality of life. Darwinian principles have been extremely successful in explaining otherwise confusing aspects of the living world. The human body definitely qualifies as a part of the living world. It would therefore be surprising if Darwinian principles were not useful in explaining how our bodies work, and why they frequently fail to work as we think they should. Amazingly, however, it’s only lately when evolutionary biologists and physicians have teamed up to understand the evolutionary causes of “why people get sick.” This new science is also called the “Darwinian Medicine.”
Today’s fervor for environmental preservation has also hit the medical industry because researchers, scientists and physicians are slowly realizing the significance of the latest emerging field called environmental endocrinology.
Environmetal endocrinology developed as a response to the increasing necessity of understanding how hormones control the physiological processes of animals who are continuously exposed to the emergencies in their natural environment; it also has its origins in Darwinian Medicine. This has only been made possible through impressive developments in hormone replacement therapy which now make feasible hormone measurements on microlitre volumes of body fluids. The results of several recent research programmes working on animals in the field are reviewed. Some of these are the reproductive responses of migratory birds in the Arctic, the role of antidiuretic hormone in the survival of desert rodents and marsupial wallabies, a few interesting behavioural effects of glucocorticoids in reptiles, and the dynamic interplay between hormones and social status in primates.
As a result of ongoing environmental pollution, the already long list of environmental agents and toxins that can affect endocrine systems has required many updates during the past 20 years.
What is Environmental Endocrinology?
Environmental endocrinology has its roots in Darwinian medicine, the field of trying to look for evolutionary explanations for vulnerabilities to illnesses. Every trait requires an evolutionary and a proximate explanation. Since disease is not a product of selection, it was seen as an exemption from such evolutionary explanations. This is one reason why doctors haven’t thought that evolution might be useful. Also, medical research is focused in identifying differences among individuals in attempt to justify why a person gets sick while the other stays healthy. But Darwinian Medicine doesn’t look for evolutionary explanations for disease itself, and does not usually try to understand why one person gets ill when another does not.
Instead, it tries to comprehend why all people are vulnerable to each illness. It asks how it is possible that natural selection can shape the eye or heart or brain but cannot eradicate our susceptibility to nearsightedness, atherosclerosis, depression, or cancer. Darwinian Medicine applies the advances that have modernized evolutionary biology to the issues on medicine and tries to offer, for each disease, an explanation for why the body isn’t better. As a result, the following classifications of diseases explanation are obtained: defenses, infection, novel environments, genes, design compromises and evolutionary legacies.
In the concluding pages of the Origin of Species, Darwin has foreseen that his work would lead to far more important research in the near future, specifically concerning human beings. The prediction of Darwin is being fulfilled. Although today, the principles of Darwinian Medicine are merely at the theoretical, it’s not too long before these can be applied in the practice of medicine. Medicine should now shift its focus to the traits that make us vulnerable to diseases - this way, it may be able to create more effective treatments. At the very least, taking a gene’s-eye evolutionary point of view helps dispel some mysteries about health and sickness. Evolution isn’t concerned to amplify the health or well-being of organisms.
Rather, it’s merely concerned about successful genetic replication - as the person is just the temporary vehicle of the genes. Our genes and us are not identical, and even if our interests and that of our genes become parallel, the genes of others could often subvert ours with their own agenda. Therefore, it’s only by understanding and appreciating the evolutionary dynamics of health and diseases shall we be able to truly comprehend the origin, persistence and treatment options of the diseases that have been affecting the human body for years. The Wiley Protocol can give you more info.
