Chapter 7: Environmental Pathology

This material is intended for medical students and faculty and accompanies the new section on health disparities in Robbins & Kumar Basic Pathology 11th edition. Although any group can experience health disparities, this video focuses on health disparities between socially defined races. I discuss terminology and the intrinsic and extrinsic causes of health disparities between socially defined races. There is also a bit of evolutionary biology to provide a foundation for understanding why biological race does not exist and why a focus on biological aspects of race in medicine should be abandoned.

This video for medical students is a broad overview of ethanol metabolism and the pathophysiologic consequences of its metabolites on the body. This material is intended to accompany the "Alcohol" section in the Environmental Pathology chapter of Robbins Pathology textbooks, to provide a foundation for organ-specific diseases later in the book.

This video centers tobacco in the Environmental Pathology chapter of Robbins Basic Pathology, as an overview of the mechanisms that contribute to disease and an introduction to the pathologic entities that you will encounter as you progress from general pathology to systems pathology. Cigarette smoking, in particular, has a HUGE impact on health. Although we usually think about cigarettes in association with lung cancer (and rightly so since 80-90% of lung cancers are linked to cigarette smoking), tobacco is an etiologic factor in multiple malignancies (AML, carcinomas of the kidney, bladder, ureter, pancreas, colon, liver) and many other diseases (e.g., diabetes, fertility issues, ectopic pregnancy, rheumatoid arthritis, cataracts) as well as harm to the fetus. In this video, I discuss some of the general mechanisms implicated in tobacco-related injury and give a broad overview of some of the entities you will see.

Ghrelin, leptin, peptide YY, proopiomelanocortin... oh my! This video will review the neurohumoral mechanisms that are part of the efferent and afferent systems and central processing system that regulate energy balance and body weight. Understanding this topic will help you communicate with your patients regarding weight gain/loss and provide insights into pharmaceutical developments in this field.