Integrative Homeostasis: A Comprehensive Approach to Health and Disease

Homeostasis is the vital characteristic of life in the open environment. Forisms first enunciated by Claude Bernard in the 19th century, it was revisited by Waddington in the 20th century to appreciate the various aspects of interchange between an organism and its outside world. A plea was launched for the development of homeostatology as an interdisciplinary subject to provide a global and unified description of living systems. This is a most valuable approach, giving the opportunity to share knowledge and ideas in all disciplines concerned with health and disease, and to make proposals for future applications. The view is progressively emerging that integrative homeostasis of higher organisms represents a dissipative structure made possible by the network of homeostatic mechanisms and processes articulated within and between the different levels of biological systems. Major principles of integrative homeostasis are wealth through diversity, optimal trade-offs, modelling of input-output functions of systems, couplings of information with material and energetic flows, and lower the power, higher the control.