Anatomical Terminology (Nursing)

00:01 Welcome to Anatomy.

00:02 We're finally going to start learning one of the most foundational subjects you could imagine when you're learning about health and human disease.

00:10 It really helps to know what the body parts are, where they are, how they connect to each other.

00:14 And most importantly, and probably most challenged me for student, what we call them.

00:20 Before we really dive into the anatomy, we're going to talk about terms and stuff like that, it's going to really help us understand this new vocabulary that you're going to be picking up.

00:32 So what we're going to try to achieve in this course is to be able to correctly use that fundamental anatomic terminology.

00:39 There's a lot of new words.

00:41 But as we go along, I'm going to try to explain what the words mean, because you'll find that a lot of them actually tell you where something is, what it's doing or both.

00:51 We're also going to talk about the key anatomic structures, not every little bit of the human body, but the stuff that's most clinically relevant.

00:59 We're going to recognize the relationships between structures.

01:03 Because that's really related to how a structure has a function, which is also something that's important to know as we go along.

01:10 And then finally, every so often, we're going to talk about common correlates, where the anatomy and clinical situations come together.

01:20 First, let's talk about how we talk about anatomy.

01:23 Talking about planes, meaning how we're viewing something.

01:28 So when we talk about planes, the first thing we'll talk about is a transverse plane, like we see here, a transverse plane is going to cut the body into upper and lower parts.

01:40 And we'll talk about you know, words we use other than upper and lower.

01:43 But right now, this is a plane that will divide the body, separating it from its head to its toes.

01:50 It's the kind of view you'll see in for example, CT scans.

01:55 We also have sagittal planes.

01:57 A sagittal plane will be a plane that divides the body into right and left halves.

02:03 And then finally, a coronal plane.

02:05 And a coronal plane is a plane that will divide the body into front and back.

02:10 But we don't really use terms like front and back and up and down.

02:13 So we're going to talk about the terms we do use in anatomy that describe relationships of things.

02:19 First, we're going to have to agree on what the standard position of the body is.

02:25 And that's something called the anatomical position.

02:27 As you can see here, it's standing upright, with the toes pointed forward, and then the upper limbs at the side with the palms pointing forward.

02:38 So these terms that we're going to talk about refer to this position.

02:44 And it helps to imagine a line a vertical line called the midline.

02:50 And it's still okay to use the terms right and left, they're very helpful in orienting.

02:57 But with respect to the midline, we're also going to use terms medial and lateral.

03:03 Medial is going to mean closer to the midline of the body.

03:06 Lateral is going to mean further away from the midline of the body.

03:11 Similar but a little different.

03:13 We have terms like distal and proximal.

03:17 Distal means further away from the body.

03:20 Proximal means closer to the body.

03:23 And it's easy to see in the upper limb, if we were to say the hand is more distal than the shoulder, for example.

03:33 If we turn around to the side, we see that we don't really say up or down, what we say is superior closer to the head, or inferior closer to the feet.

03:45 We also don't say front or back, we tend to say anterior or ventral, and posterior or dorsal.

03:56 And if we do a transverse view, here's a good example of a transverse view.

04:01 When we talk about internal structures, we'll say something's more superficial if it's closer to the skin, and we'll say deep if it's closer to the center of the body.

04:15 There are a lot of movements of the body can carry out and it depends on the specific joint.

04:21 But we'll talk about some generic ones right now as an introduction.

04:26 For example, we'll start with a shoulder joint.

04:29 And the shoulder here is in the anatomic position where the upper limb is just resting at the side.

04:36 We have something called adduction and abduction, and they sound very similar adduction, ad-deduction, and ab- or abduction mean the opposite of each other.

04:49 Adduction is when in this case, a limb is brought closer to the midline of the body.

04:57 Abduction on the other hand, is where it's swung away from the body.

05:06 If we look down from a superior point of view, we can also see something called rotation, also at the shoulder joint.

05:14 When we rotate a joint towards the body, we have medial or internal rotation.

05:21 When we rotate a joint away from the body, we have lateral or external rotation.

05:27 At other joints, especially the elbow or the knee that act like hinges, that brings us to flexion and extension.

05:35 And at these hinges, the angle of the hinge either increases or decreases.

05:42 So for example, if we were to increase the angle at a hinge joint, we would have extension.

05:49 And if we were to decrease that angle, that will be flexion.

05:54 And again, if we were to go back to a straight arm it would be increasing that angle again it would be extension again.

06:01 We also have some movements that are relatively unique to certain joints that we'll talk about as we get there.

06:06 One example is a type of joint that exists at the ankle.

06:11 And there's an ability to bring the toe towards the body or immediately, and that's called Inversion.

06:19 And then if we move the foot outward, we call that Eversion.

06:25 And this is something that exists because of the shape of the joint here that allows this movement but it's not something that's capable of every joint.

06:35 Finally, what is anatomy actually mean? Well, anatomy tome actually means cut and atom actually means to cut up.

06:44 And that's because it used to be the only way to learn anatomy was by cutting up cadavers.

06:49 And the approach that way had to be by regions that you were actually dissecting, going from limb to limb to the head and neck to the thorax to the abdomen to the pelvis.

07:01 And it didn't really follow what we would say our systems.

07:05 Fortunately, we have technology today that allows us to learn by other methods.

07:09 And so we're going to go through the body and systems, musculoskeletal systems, the circulatory system, the nervous system, the respiratory system, gastrointestinal, and genitourinary systems.