A regimen is a plan, or course of action such as a

diet Diet may refer to: Food * Diet (nutrition), the sum of the food consumed by an organism or group * Dieting, the deliberate selection of food to control body weight or nutrient intake ** Diet food, foods that aid in creating a diet for weight loss ...

exercise Exercise or workout is physical activity that enhances or maintains fitness and overall health. It is performed for various reasons, including weight loss or maintenance, to aid growth and improve strength, develop muscles and the cardio ...

medical treatment A therapy or medical treatment is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a medical diagnosis. Both words, ''treatment'' and ''therapy'', are often abbreviated tx, Tx, or Tx. As a rule, each therapy has indications an ...

. A low-salt diet is a regimen. A course of

penicillin Penicillins (P, PCN or PEN) are a group of beta-lactam antibiotic, β-lactam antibiotics originally obtained from ''Penicillium'' Mold (fungus), moulds, principally ''Penicillium chrysogenum, P. chrysogenum'' and ''Penicillium rubens, P. ru ...

is a regimen, and there are many

chemotherapy regimen A chemotherapy regimen is a regimen for chemotherapy, defining the drugs to be used, their dosage, the frequency and duration of treatments, and other considerations. In modern oncology, many regimens combine several chemotherapy drugs in combi ...

s in the treatment of

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving Cell growth#Disorders, abnormal cell growth with the potential to Invasion (cancer), invade or Metastasis, spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Po ...

History

The work, ''Regimen in Acute Diseases'', attributed to the ancient Greek physician,

Hippocrates of Cos Hippocrates of Kos (; ; ), also known as Hippocrates II, was a Greek physician and philosopher of the classical period who is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine. He is traditionally referred to as the "Fat ...

, describes the types and usage of medical regimens in his era (400 BCE). This is perhaps the first appearance of the term.

PubMed PubMed is an openly accessible, free database which includes primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institute ...

at the

US National Library of Medicine The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library. Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the NLM is an institute within the National Institutes of Health. It ...

lists over 220,000 articles using the term "regimen" from 1892 to January 2013. In the context of medieval medicine, regimen referred to the careful management of habits, diet, and schedule to keep the four

humors Humorism, the humoral theory, or humoralism, was a system of medicine detailing a supposed makeup and workings of the human body, adopted by Ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers. Humorism began to fall out of favor in the 17th c ...

in equilibrium. By manipulating the six non-naturals (airs, diet, sleep, exercise, evacuation, and emotion) a person could keep track of their physical and mental wellbeing by attending to regimen.

Usage in statistics

In economic statistics, a regimen refers to the selected goods and/or services priced for the purpose of compiling a

price index A price index (''plural'': "price indices" or "price indexes") is a normalized average (typically a weighted average) of price relatives for a given class of goods or services in a specific region over a defined time period. It is a statistic ...

. The most well known example is the

consumer price index A consumer price index (CPI) is a statistical estimate of the level of prices of goods and services bought for consumption purposes by households. It is calculated as the weighted average price of a market basket of Goods, consumer goods and ...

References

Therapy {{treatment-stub