Clinical Ecology and its Repercussions on General Medicine and Epidemiology

Abstract

The need for ecological perspectives in medicine and epidemiology is now obvious. The grand interconnected challenges of our time (infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases, global socioeconomic inequalities, biodiversity losses, climate change, disconnect from the natural environment, etc.) demands that all of medicine be viewed from an ecological perspective. it is increasingly clear that each person maintains complex, biologically-relevant microbial ecosystems, and those ecosystems are, in turn, a product of the lived experiences within larger social, political, and economic ecosystems. Biodiversity maintains a microbiota or microbial ecology, and its dysbiotic drift is associated with contextual changes (environmental contamination, chemical modification, altered absorption of macronutrients, etc.) that cause dysregulation that affects the anatomy, physiology, immunology, growth and evolution of living beings, leading to changes in health / physical and mental illness, and that leads to responses in clinical medicine and interventions on lifestyle factors (dietary patterns, hygiene, physical activity, sleep hygiene, etc.), which in turn act on biodiversity and microbiota, in different contexts that are modulated by psychosocial factors, family, work, community, socioeconomic groups, age, sex, vulnerable populations, etc. Clinical ecology is a perspective that sees illness as a response to the total lived experience and the surroundings in which “exposures” accumulate. Clinical ecology is manifesting itself in the ecosystems at the tip of an intestinal villus and elsewhere in and on the body. Clinical ecology is a development towards another clinical medicine and another epidemiology that must understand the experiences of man in terms of multidirectional, simultaneous and sequential causal interrelationships of the microcosm and the macrocosm.