[Methods and knowledge--the necessity for a system-oriented environmental medicine]

Despite the marked signs that human interventions and manipulations of the natural environment are dangerous to human health, physicians are not very interested in correlations between diseases and changes of the global environment. Physicians and scientists of the medical faculties of the universities as well as residents and general practitioners mostly ignore ecological effects on human life. The reason for this is not only insufficient education, but in particular a wrong theoretical basis with regard to the explanations of global biological and ecological processes. The present paper is supposed to point to the major problems of environmental medicine and the necessity of broader and more detailed scientific knowledge to recognise the multidimensional nature of kinetic and evolutionary systems.