Chronobiology
Chronobiology is the science of temporal processes in the various bodily functions of biological systems which can be measured in terms of periodical phenomena of varying duration. Subdisciplines include chronomedicine, chronophysiology, chronopharmacology, chronotherapy, chronodiagnosis and chronoprevention, each of which describes certain areas of application of chronobiology. The subdiscipline chronomedicine is concerned with periodic processes of bodily functions in man and animals. The approach is holistic; which is to say that psychological and biochemical functions are subjected to investigation as well as physiological ones. Chronodiagnosis and chronotherapy, as well as chronopharmacotherapy in its own special form, may themselves be considered to be subdisciplines of chronomedicine.
The methodological aim of chronomedicine is to go beyond the usual approach of determining the qualities of bodily functions on the basis of mean values and variance and to regard the regulatory changes which take place in all life processes as representing the norm. This point of view opens up new means and methods for chronodiagnosis and chronotherapy. On the one hand it establishes links between conventional medicine and psychology; on the other hand between ancient oriental medical lore and modern western medicine with its primarily organic, morphologically or biochemically oriented approaches. Chronomedicine is involved with the recognition and interpretation of biological rhythms in any given temporal framework. Thus it interprets pathological or sanogenetic processes in terms of disturbances to or the restoration of regulatory sequences.
"Disease begins at the moment when the regulatory equipment of the body no longer suffices to remove the disturbances. Not life under abnormal conditions, not the disturbance as such, engenders a disease, but rather disease begins with the insufficiency of the regulatory apparatus."
Rudolf Virchow (1869), 1856 Director of the Institute for Pathology of the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, 1821 – 1902
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