Hi, I'm Mimi Jakoi.
I'm the course director for Introductory Human Physiology.
And I just want to have a few words about what our course is about and
what physiology is about.
The physiology in general is an integrative science that
deals with complex living organisms, from cells and molecules to organs and
organ systems level.
The physiologist is going to ask two questions.
One is, how does the organ and the organ system work?
And secondly, what's the advantage that this organ system provides to the body?
As you go through our course, what you will find is that you
will learn all the terms and concepts that deal with specific organ systems.
But that importantly are going to develop a working model.
And this working model, it's going to allow you to understand how these organ
systems coordinate to maintain life in a constantly changing environment.
The model allows you to relate structure to function,
to interpret physiologic data, such as blood pressures and, and blood gases.
And also, it's going to allow you to predict the changes of
the body to specific perturbations.
The kinds of changes that we're talking about are acute changes,
such as, you eat a bag of salty potato chips, what happens?
We also can have situations where we have chronic changes.
You've been training for a marathon, how does your body respond?
When you're actually running the marathon, what is happening to your body?
And what happens if you go onto a low salt diet and maintain a low salt diet?
The other things that we're going to do
is we're going to be using throughout the courses little case studies, and these
case studies are going to allow us to perturb the body and get normal responses.
But we're also going to be looking for how what happens when
these normal responses actually fail and we end up with disease?
So, the course is targeted then to individuals who are interested in health
sciences and in health science professions, such as nursing,
physical therapy, patho physician assistance, and medicine.
It is not the background is elementary biology and that it will provide
you then with the information that you need to go forward into these professions.
It is an excellent preparation for the MCAT exam.
