Functions
The integumentary system has multiple roles in homeostasis. All body systems work in an interconnected manner to maintain the internal conditions essential to the function of the body. The skin has an important job of protecting the body and acts as the body’s first line of defense against infection, temperature change, and other challenges to homeostasis. Functions include:
- Protect the body’s internal living tissues and organs
- Protect against invasion by infectious organisms
- Protect the body from dehydration
- Protect the body against abrupt changes in temperature, maintain homeostasis
- Help excrete waste materials through perspiration
- Act as a receptor for touch, pressure, pain, heat, and cold (see Somatosensory system)
- Protect the body against sunburns by secreting melanin
- Generate vitamin D through exposure to ultraviolet light
- Store water, fat, glucose, and vitamin D
- Maintenance of the body form
- Formation of new cells from stratum germinativum to repair minor injuries
- Aid in physical examination as color of the skin may indicate many conditions e.g. it becomes yellowish in jaundice
Read more about this topic: Integumentary System
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that there are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)