Over 1 million nursing students trust Simple Nursing to help them pass nursing school and the NCLEX. So head over to simplenursing.com forward slash YouTube to join them in their success. Hi everybody, Dr. Mike here.
In this video, we're going to take a look at parts of the respiratory tract. Now we're going to follow the pathway of air from being inspired from the outer atmosphere all the way down into our lungs and have a look at some of the major anatomical compartments or structures that that air needs to move through, what we call the conducting pathways. First of all, when air is first inspired, it enters something called the nasal cavity.
Now once it enters the nasal cavity, it moves to the back of the throat and that area we call the pharynx. And there's actually three parts to the pharynx. So I'm going to highlight this entire area here as the pharynx. Now sometimes we can inspire air through the mouth and so obviously that's going to go through the oral cavity.
Now with the pharynx, we've got the nasal portion which we call the nasopharynx. We've got the oral portion which we call the oropharynx. And we've got the next portion here called the larynx and this part of the back of the throat just where the larynx is is called the laryngeopharynx.
Which means that the next component is called the larynx. Now what we've just highlighted here from the nasal cavity to the three aspects of the pharynx to the larynx is what we call the upper respiratory tract. Now this is important clinically because you've heard of upper and lower respiratory tract infections.
So obviously upper respiratory tract infections involve these anatomical components. So what do lower respiratory tract infections refer to? Well, we then go to the trachea.
Air passes through the trachea and then the trachea splits and this is known as a bifurcation. It bifurcates left and right and once it bifurcates it turns into the left and right main stem like the stem of a tree bronchi. So these are called bronchi. So I'm just going to label one but we know we're referring to both bronchi. Looking to cut your study time in half?
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