The new 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. In other words, environmental endocrinology explains how environmental stressors like light, food and even crowding affect multiple endocrine systems and how these consequently control aging and the quality of life. Darwinian principles have been extremely successful in explaining otherwise confusing aspects of the living world. And under the catergory of the living world is of course, the human body. It follows therefore, that Darwinian principles must be useful in explaining how our bodies work. However, only lately have evolutionary biologists teamed up with doctors to try to understand the evolutionary causes of "why we get sick." The end result is the new science of "Darwinian Medicine".

The field of environmental endocrinology has begun to gain popularity as a result of today's increasing fervor for environmental preservation.

Environmental endocrinology has its roots in Darwinian medicine, and it developed as a response to the need to understand how hormones modulate and control physiological processes in organisms exposed to the emergencies in their particular, natural, environment. Thanks to the breakthrough developments in hormone replacement therapy - which made hormone measurements on microlitre volumes of body fluids feasible - this new field of medicine is starting to become viable. As a result, findings of studies involving animals were now being reviewed. The resproductive responses of migratory birds in the Arctic, a few interesting behavioural effects of glucocorticoids in reptiles, the role of antidiuretic hormone in the survival of desert rodents and marsupial wallabies, and the dynamic interplay between hormones and social status in primates are just examples of the things that were being reviewed.

As a consequence of ongoing environmental pollution, the already long tally of environmental agents and toxins that can affect endocrine systems has prompted many updates during the past twenty years.

What is Environmental Endocrinology?

Environmental endocrinology has its origins in Darwinian medicine, the enterprise of trying to look for evolutionary explanations for vulnerabilities to disease. Every trait needs an evolutionary as well as 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 medical practitioners have not realized that evolution might be useful. Another reason is that medical research looks for differences among individuals in order to explain why one person gets ill as another stays healthy. But Darwinian Medicine does not seek evolutionary explanations for disease itself, and doesn't usually try to understand why one person gets ill when another doesn't.

What it prides itself in is in seeking to understand why human beings, generall, become vulnerable to disease. It asks how it is possible that natural selection can shape the eye or heart or brain but cannot eradicate our vulnerabilities to nearsightedness, atherosclerosis, depression, or cancer. Darwinian Medicine seeks to provide explanations on why the human body is not better and it applies to medical science the same advances that have revolutionized evolutionary biology. These evolutionary explanations for disease fit nicely into just a few classifications: defenses, infection, novel environments, genes, design compromises, and evolutionary legacies.

Darwin knew, as written in the concluding pages of the Origin of Species, that his work would become far more useful in the near future, most specifically on matters concerning human beings. Darwin's prediction is being fulfilled. At present, Darwinian medicine exists only at the theoretical level, but the insights of Darwinian medicine could work a profound transformation in practice of medicine in the next century. Medicine should now shift its focus to the traits that make us vulnerable to diseases - this way, it may be able to generate more successful treatments. In effect, by having the perspective of a gene's-eye, we may be able to understand some of the most mysterious phenomena surrounding health and sickness. Evolution isn't concerned to maximize the health or well-being of organisms.

It's only concerned with successful genetic replication, and what serves this purpose is only contingently related to the health and well-being of the organism acting as the temporary host for the genes. What is good for our genes is not necessarily good for us, and even if our interests and our genes' interests become parallel, the genes of other organisms can often destabilize ours with their own agendas. Therefore, it is only by understanding and appreciating the evolutionary dynamics of health and diseases should we be able to totally comprehend the origin, persistence and treatment options of the illnesses that have been affecting the human body for years. The Wiley Protocol can tell you more.