Pregnancy and beyond: environmental frontiers.

Over the last 35 years transport technology has created new environmental frontiers, both in research and in the administration of patient care, in which family physicians are, and will continue to be, involved. Some of these frontiers address basic physiological problems that become interconnected with others. The author describes six of these frontiers, with specific relation to pregnancy, from hyperbarism (undersea physiology) to microgravity (space physiology). He outlines the problems and linkages, where evident, in a series of four articles, of which this first one deals with pregnancy and rapid decelerations with resultant trauma, and pregnancy and hyperbarism.