Health ecology is a new discipline that examines the interaction between humans, disease, and their environment, including mental factors. It contextualizes diseases in reference to the overall environment, providing data to government agencies and healthcare professionals. It is a complementary field to medicine and is offered as a degree program in some schools.
Health ecology is a fairly new discipline of study that evaluates humans and well-being in relation to their total environment. In some forms of health ecology, researchers might examine the health risk profiles of a particular group of people and compare this information to some known factors about those people’s environments.
Health ecology can delve into the interaction between human beings, disease and their home, work or external environment, but also the individual’s mental environment. Health ecology might evaluate feelings, thoughts, attitudes, religious and exercise practices, and diet in examining overall health.
Health ecology can reasonably be called disease assessment which differs from traditional medicine. If a person has an occasional headache, he or she is likely to use an over-the-counter medication to stop the pain. Your doctor may want to know the reason for your headache and may run several tests to rule out migraine, to look for high blood pressure, to check for allergies, or to see if there are any sinus infections.
In health ecology, the questions to the person with the headache could be much broader. The researcher would like to know where the person lives, what kind of cleaners they use, what kind of work they do, and how often they take a walk. The health ecologist may also want to understand the person’s perception of the headache, the person’s stress level, and the person’s meditation or religious practices.
In this way, the health ecologist contextualizes the headache in reference to the overall environment of the person, not simply from a medical point of view. However, health ecology does not ignore medical data. Instead it augments it with much more information about the person’s interaction with their total environment.
Applications of health ecology tend to include cluster analysis, based on known interactions with the whole environment. The health ecologist can provide data to government agencies developing health risk profiles to broaden understanding of how disease is affected by the total environment. The health ecologist could also be a nurse or doctor who works with people with diseases that cannot be diagnosed by normal medical means. For example, the field of environmental diseases, where some must have very limited exposure to the world outside their homes, is of great interest to the health ecologist.
There are now numerous reputable schools offering initial and advanced degrees in health ecology. Some medical schools now also offer at least introductory classes in this field. It is not uncommon to see nursing schools offering similar introductory courses. While the field is large, it is definitely thought to be of great significance and scientifically valid. It is complementary to medicine as both medicine and health ecology have the ultimate goal of improving the health of all people.
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