Medical anthropology is the study of health, illness, disease, healing, and health-care practices from an anthropological perspective. It examines how biological, cultural, social, economic, political, and environmental factors influence human health. Within environmental anthropology, medical anthropology is especially significant because human health cannot be separated from the ecological conditions in which people live. Water, food, forests, animals, pollution, climate, occupation, and environmental degradation can influence disease patterns and people's ideas about health and illness. Medical anthropologists therefore examine both the cultural interpretation of illness and the relationship between human communities and their environments. Several major theoretical approaches have developed within medical anthropology. The ecological and ecological-systemic approach views health and disease as outcomes of interactions between human beings, culture, society, and the physical environment. It draws attention to the relationship between population, resources, nutrition, climate, pathogens, and patterns of subsistence. Illness is not regarded merely as a biological problem but as something influenced by ecological circumstances. For example, changes in rainfall, deforestation, water scarcity, or agricultural practices may alter the distribution of infectious diseases and affect nutrition. Human adaptation to environmental conditions is therefore central to understanding health. This approach is particularly relevant to environmental anthropology because it demonstrates that environmental transformations can produce direct and indirect health consequences. The cultural ecology approach, associated particularly with anthropologists such as Julian Steward, examines how cultural practices develop in relation to environmental conditions. In medical anthropology, it helps explain how food habits, settlement patterns, livelihood systems, and traditional health practices are adapted to particular environments. Different societies develop distinct ways of understanding and managing health because they live under different ecological and cultural conditions. For instance, pastoral communities, forest-dependent groups, agricultural societies, and fishing communities may experience different occupational risks and nutritional conditions. Their systems of healing may consequently reflect their ecological circumstances. The cultural interpretation or explanatory model approach is strongly associated with Arthur Kleinman. It argues that illness is not simply a biological condition; it is also interpreted through culturally shaped ideas. Kleinman distinguished between disease, the biomedical understanding of a pathological condition, and illness, the individual's experience and interpretation of suffering. Different groups may have different explanations for the same symptoms. A person may understand illness through concepts of imbalance, pollution, supernatural forces,