The natural environment provides humans with the basic resources necessary for life. In public health terms, concern for the environment and its effects on health is the most fundamental form of primary prevention.
Environmental exposures affect every body system, and thus can involve every medical specialty.
Physicians roles in environmental health extend from the office setting, with the need to recognize, treat and prevent work-related or environmentally related illnesses in individual patients, to the community, national or international levels as physicians become more involved in research, preventive measures and policy strategies on topics such as air pollution, water contamination and climate change. Despite the growing importance of physicians in recognizing and intervening in occupationally and environmentally related illnesses, medical school curricula have been slow in addressing this area. In the curriculum map of year I, Patient Doctor I has served as the important launching point for the EOM theme with its session on taking the occupational and environmental health history. This session also serves as the building block for Year II course, Patient Doctor II , in which students then learn how to apply the information from the environmental health history to differential diagnosis, and to the assessment of causal relationships between exposures and illness. EOM sessions in PDR II offer the opportunity to expand on the concept of the physical examination of an individual patient, to include, when indicated, the physical examination of his environmental setting, whether home, community, or workplace.