CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Physiol.
Sec. Integrative Physiology
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Technologies and Pedagogical Strategies Reshaping Medical Physiology EducationView all 5 articles
How Should We Teach Homeostasis? Filling the Gaps and Envisioning the Future
Provisionally accepted
- Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine, Rochester, United States
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This article provides a conceptual and pedagogical analysis aimed at advancing homeostasis education within integrative physiology. Although homeostasis was originally formulated to describe the stability of the internal environment (IE), educators have traditionally emphasized the regulation of individual parameters such as body temperature, blood glucose, and blood pressure. This emphasis reflects historical methodological limitations rather than the full conceptual scope intended by Claude Bernard and Walter Cannon. Building on conceptual developments articulated in Kuang (2023), the present analysis examines how homeostasis education can be refined and reoriented by clarifying several foundational conceptual distinctions. In particular, it addresses persistent gaps in current teaching, including common ambiguities related to the concepts of steady state, dynamic equilibrium, constancy, and stability and builds upon the distinction between parameter homeostasis and IE homeostasis to strengthen its pedagogical and conceptual application. At the organism level, the article addresses how IE homeostasis can be appropriately interpreted and taught, highlighting its emergent nature and the role of modern integrative measurements, including multi-omics approaches, in supporting a system-level understanding of homeostasis. Overall, the analysis supports the following central conclusions: (1) Parameter homeostasis refers to the relatively stable oscillation of the parameter value; (2) IE homeostasis constitutes a high-level emergent property of the organism; (4) modern integrative measurement approaches make it possible to study the IE as a whole, providing system-level readouts relevant to IE homeostasis; and (4) the conceptual scope of homeostasis or homeostatic tendency, is expanded in two directions: across health, subhealth, disease, and psychological steady states, and toward an explicit recognition of the constitutive role of organism–environment interactions in shaping internal stability. In sum, this article envisions an integrated direction for homeostasis education that moves beyond parameter-centric approaches and supports a coherent understanding of organismal regulation, adaptation, and resilience across diverse conditions.
Keywords: Emergent property, Homeostasis, homeostatic tendency, Integrative Physiology, internalenvironment, Metabolomics, oscillation, steady state
Received: 09 Jan 2026; Accepted: 13 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Kuang and Naik. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Serena Y. Kuang
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