The human body is the material substrate that everything else in this module depends on. Pain is produced by a nervous system. Pharmacology describes how drugs interact with cells, enzymes, and receptors. Airway management is the management of anatomical structures carrying gas to the lungs. Somatics is the body as experienced from within — but there must be a body to experience.
This topic provides the foundational anatomy and physiology that the rest of the medicine module assumes. It is organized by level of organization (cell → tissue → organ → system) and then by organ system, covering the structures and functions that appear throughout the module’s more specialized content.
The goal is not encyclopedic coverage. It is to establish the concepts needed to understand what a neuron does before discussing nociceptive pathways, what a receptor is before discussing pharmacodynamics, what the cardiovascular system does before discussing oxygenation, and what inflammation is before discussing central sensitization.
This topic connects to psychology through the nervous system — the same neural architecture that produces movement and sensation also produces affect, processes trauma, and mediates attachment. The brain is not an organ system separate from the body; it is the nervous system’s central node, and psychological processes are what the nervous system does. This topic also connects to somatics: the musculoskeletal and nervous systems together constitute the substrate for somatic awareness, proprioception, interoception, and the habitual tension patterns that somatic practices address. And Traditional Chinese Medicine’s Zang-Fu system provides an alternative organization of the body — by functional relationship rather than anatomical structure — that captures integration patterns the organ-system approach can obscure.