The etymology of the term etiology takes us to the Greek word aitiology. In general, it can be said that the etiology is the study of the causes of something .
The notion is often used in the field of medicine to refer to the study of the causes of diseases . The etiology, in this context, analyzes the origin of health disorders, investigating the factors that produce them.
At present, it is understood that a disease it needs three factors to develop: a Guest (the organism that gets sick), a agent (that or that which causes discomfort or damage) and a environment (the environment). The three factors, according to the etiology, must be concurrent in space and time for the disease to manifest itself.
A virus , a bacterium , a fungus or a parasite , to cite some possibilities, they can act as agents, affecting a human being (the host) who is in a certain area. Once the disease is present in the person, it is important to resort to the etiology to know its causes since that information helps to define the treatment.
The etiology also recognizes that the factors may be facilitators , predisposing , enhancers or triggers . According to sex, the age , housing conditions and nutrition, an individual may be more or less likely to get certain diseases.
Already at the time of Cos Hippocrates , an important Greek doctor who lived in the Pericles century, doctors asked their patients three key questions to begin the elaboration of the clinic history :
* What's up?
* Since when?
* What do you think is the reason?
In other words, the doctor gives the patient the opportunity to express your opinion about the cause of your discomfort. In the 19th century, the chemist Louis pasteur and the biologist Claude bernard , both from France, represented two points of view that medicine had been studying for a long time: the cause of a disease is a single factor; The cause arises from several factors that act simultaneously.
In this way the basis of the etiology was forged, which, like all the creations of the human being, went through different stages. Bernard focused on environmental, internal and external factors; his theory He argued that the disease arose from having lost internal balance, something that usually occurs due to a long list of factors.
For his part, Pasteur dedicated his efforts to discover what role the bacteria in the appearance of a disease, and for this he related several diseases with certain microbes. His theories were widely accepted because he was able to demonstrate several of these relationships.
This discussion, which laid the foundations of etiology, leaned in favor of Pasteur, and thus doctors began to accept that diseases are caused by specific microbes. A scientific German called Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch It was he who formulated the concept of scientific etiology, proper.
Biology advanced a lot during the 19th century thanks to the development of technology focused on medicine, which led to the creation of diagnostic instruments such as stethoscope and devices to measure blood pressure, in addition to promoting the sophistication of surgery. This growth helped with the definition of the etiology, as it gave doctors more tools to find the causes of the diseases, not forgetting that it also enhanced the effectiveness of the treatments.
It is important not to confuse etiology with ethology : This last term refers to the specialty of biology that is dedicated to studying how animals .
