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Homeostasis

Published on June 29, 2022   30 min

A selection of talks on Physiology & Anatomy

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0:00
Hello and welcome to Fundamentals of Human Physiology. My name is Charles Sevigny, and I'm a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia.
0:12
Now, this first activity today, we're going to talk about what physiology is, a very important thing for us to understand. We'll talk a little bit about what you can expect in the rest of the course. Then we'll get into some of the first principles of physiology, namely homeostasis, diffusion, osmolarity, Fick's law, these sorts of things. Now, these might seem like very basic concepts, but they form the foundations of far more complex things that we'll be learning over the rest of the course. We're going to ease in today like an old man into a warm bath. Starting to think about these first principles that we can build upon.
0:45
But first things first, let's talk about what physiology is. Physiology is the science of how the body works. If anatomy is a study of what's there, physiology is the study of how it functions. This is really fascinating to me and why I have such a passion for physiology, because in order to understand how any one system functions, you need to understand how all other systems in our body function because they all are integrated and work together. For example, if you think about our metabolism in our cells, our cells require oxygen in order to undergo metabolism. We have a respiratory system to feed that. They're also putting off carbon dioxide, but we need to transport that around our body body because our body is huge. We need a circulatory system to support that. That circulatory system requires fluid, and we need to make sure that we have the right balance of fluid. That's where our kidneys come in. All of these systems work together to keep us alive at any given point and time.

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