Human Metabolism in Health and Disease 2009

Human metabolism is a key component of the basic science knowledge that underlies the practice of medicine and allied health professions. It is fundamental to understanding how the body adapts to physiologic stress, how defects in metabolism result in disease, and why data from the clinical chemistry laboratory are useful to diagnose disease and monitor the efficacy of treatment. Over the more than three decades that each of the authors has been teaching biochemistry to medical students, we have found students increasingly overwhelmed with details that tend to obscure rather than elucidate principles of human metabolism.