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Environmental medicine is a multidisciplinary field involving medicine, environmental science, chemistry and others, overlapping with environmental pathology. It can be viewed as the medical branch of the broader field of environmental health. The scope of this field involves studying the interactions between environment and human health, and the role of the environment in causing or mediating disease. This specialist field of study developed after the realisation that health is more widely and dramatically affected by environmental factors than previously recognized.
Environmental factors in the causation of environmental diseases can be classified into:
- Physical
- Chemical
- Biological
- Social (including Psychological and Culture variables)
- Ergonomic
- Safety
- Any combination of the above
In the United States, the American College of Preventive Medicine oversees board certification of physicians in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. [1]