Hi, I'm Mimi Jakoi. I'm the course director for Introductory Human Physiology. I just want to say a few words about what our course is about and what physiology is about. 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 you are going to develop a working model. This working model, will 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 blood gases. Also, it's going to allow you to predict the changes that occur in 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 thing that we're going to do is to use throughout the courses little case studies. 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 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, physician assistants, and medicine. The background needed is elementary biology. This course will provide you with the information that you need to go forward into these professions. It is an excellent preparation for the MCAT exam.
