Overview of Human Anatomical Organization

Welcome to Human Anatomy. This is our first lecture and we're going to start with a topic of anatomical organization. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to write that title up top. What I want you to do is follow along with me. I'm always going to write a title up top in all caps like that and then I'll write the different information underneath it and your job is to follow along with me as I go and write things down in your notebook as I do and if you ever need to pause the video of course you can do that to catch up in case I go too quickly. So for anatomical organization we're talking about anatomy and how we define anatomical terms. So there's something that is called anatomical position, and this is probably the most important piece of the foundation of anatomy because when we're talking about anatomical position, that's how we're going to reference any different body part in its relation to another body part. So I'm going to draw a little guy here. So he's going to have a head and he's going to be facing us and he's going to have chunky hands unintentionally. So that's my little attempt at drawing a little guy here. Anatomical position is someone standing up facing forward. So we're looking at the front of this person with their hands at their palms at their side. So we're looking at the palms of their hands. Now this is very important because how this person stands is going to determine how we're talking about him. So I encourage you to look up a picture of anatomical position as well. Note that again, someone's going to be standing up, you're going to be looking at the front of their body, and you're going to be looking at the palms of their hands instead of the back of their hands. And that's what we decided is anatomical position. Now, if we look at this guy, we are again looking at the front of his body, but we're looking at him from our perspective in our eyes. So when we're looking at him, Our right side of our body is right here and our left side of our body is right here. But when we're facing this person, the right side of his body is right here and the left side of his body is right there. So it's opposite of what the sides are on our own body. So I put a little R there to signify that that is the person's right side. and an L to signify that that is the person's left side. So remember, it's not going to be the same as what you're looking at on your body. Whenever you're looking at a patient or talking about something in anatomical position, we're usually talking about looking at it from the front. So the sides are going to be switched, okay? So if you have any questions about that, definitely. You feel free to Google things as always, but then you can definitely shoot me an email because this is one of the most important topics as a foundation for anatomy. Now, in addition to this, we have a couple of different names for how people can be positioned. So one position is called supine, and supine means... someone lying on their back. We also have a position called prone and that means someone lying on their stomach. So that's separate from the anatomical position but it's just adding things in. So anatomical position is for how we talk about things. and how we discuss body parts in relation to other body parts. But these different things right here, supine and prone, are positions that a person can be lying in. Alright, so our next thing we're going to talk about is something called sectioning planes. For sectioning planes, that really means how we're cutting up the body. So it'll make more sense in a moment, but I'm going to draw three little people here. And review what these three different planes are. I'm going to make him smiling because he's happy. Oops. I made the legs really long on this one and really short on that one. That was not intentional. But. Basically, we're looking at a front view of someone right here, and then we're looking at a side view of someone right there. Okay, so that's the difference between these things. I'm just going to draw a line to separate. So these are three different planes. All right. The first plane we're going to be talking about is called transverse plane. But it's also called horizontal. And it's also called axial. So this one's a little more complicated in that it has three different names. Now let me draw that out for you. This is going to be the plane we're talking about. So we're going to be talking about the plane going across someone's body, and I drew three different green lines to represent this transverse horizontal or axial plane, because this is going to be very important in terms of how we talk about different structures for anatomy. So for these planes, you can kind of almost think about them as a glass sheet that's cutting through someone. So for this transverse plane, remember, which is also called the horizontal or axial plane, it's as if we're taking a glass plate through this person and sticking it in between them to separate this upper portion from the lower portion of their body. And this will make more sense as we go through our anatomy lessons and we use these planes to describe the locations of body parts and relate them to each other. to others but for now just know that we're using different planes and it's um dividing this one divides the body into the upper or superior portion and lower inferior portion but i have three different green lines because you can talk about the transverse plane in any area of the body so i just drew three as an example all right so our next one is called sagittal plane and then there's also something called made the sagittal so let me explain that after I draw this line through this person So this is our second plane called sagittal. It's represented by this purple line as if I was taking a glass plate and sticking it into this person. Now this is going to separate their right from their left. Okay, now if there is, you know how with the transverse plane, I showed you three different green lines to represent that you can do this in any part of someone's body. You can also do this to the side here for someone. but this line going straight down through the middle is cutting a person's body in half. Now that is called mid-sagittal plane, but if we're just cutting a person in half between right and left, but it's not in the center, that's just referred to as sagittal. Alright, now our last sectioning plane that we have for anatomy is called the coronal plane. But it's also called the frontal plane. Oops, I forgot to color this purple. Now we'll color our coronal plane orange. And this coronal plane. Remember, this person is positioned differently than the other one. These two guys are facing forward. Now this person is facing to the side. You can see because their nose and their smile and their legs are oriented differently. Now we're going to take this plane. Remember, it's as if we're taking a glass plate and sticking it through someone. And we're going to slice it through someone like that. So it's going to separate the front and the back of them. So if that helps, that's kind of how we're going to talk about these different planes. Remember, the transverse plane separates the upper or superior part of someone from the inferior or lower part. The sagittal or mid-sagittal separates the right and left part. And then the coronal. Separates the front and the back. Okay. Now let's bring in a few terms that are going to be really important as we go through our anatomy learning. Okay, so this is going to be called, these are really going to be our directional terms. And remember, we're still under this title of anatomical organization, but I'm just breaking it up into parts. I'm going to continue to do this throughout our lectures and do it almost in like an outline style to make sure that we can organize things correctly in our brain, because that's the hardest part oftentimes is organizing things as you're learning anatomy. Alright, so let's learn our directional terms. I'm going to draw a little person here again. So his nose and his smile are always going to tell you where he's facing. So he's facing this direction to the side. Now we're looking at the front of his body right here and the back of his body right here. So what we're going to call the back side of things is posterior. Or dorsal. I like to remember that because if you think about a dorsal fin on a dolphin, that's on the back of them. And it really means the back of a person. Now, the front of a person is going to be anterior. or ventral. So this is very helpful, right? Because if we're talking about this anatomical position that this guy is standing in, remember with his palms facing forward, that's what we're using to reference all anatomical body parts. But we also have to use directional terms in order to make that anatomical position make sense. So, for example, if I have a patient in front of me and they are having pain. So remember, I'm in anatomical position. My hands are facing forward. If they're having pain right here on their forearm. How are we going to know if we're going to call that anterior or posterior pain? We're going to know because we always refer to everything in anatomical position. So if a patient is telling me they have pain right here, I'm going to reference anatomical position in my head and say, oh, this is the positioning with a patient standing. and we're looking at the front of them with their palms facing forward, this has to be the front of our forearm when we're looking at anatomical position. Now how do we talk about the front of someone's body using our directional terms? We're going to talk about it as anterior. So this person will have anterior forearm pain. The only way I'm able to decide that and give it that name So other clinicians will be able to follow along and know where that person is having their pain. is because we referenced anatomical position and our directional terms. Okay, now we're going to talk about a few more of these directional terms. I'm going to draw another person here. You'll be able to tell that my drawings are very mediocre at times, so hang in there with me. I really just want to draw the form of someone's body here. I don't really care that his legs are all messed up. Alrighty, so remember we're looking at someone in anatomical position again here. Now what we're going to do is I'm going to draw arrows pointing towards the center of the body. And when we're pointing more towards the center of the body, that's going to be referred to as medial. Now I'm also going to do the opposite in pointing away from the midline of the body. And that's going to be referred to as lateral. All right. So let's say we're talking about your lower ribs that are about right here. And we're talking about... your something called your sternum which is in the middle of your body right here your sternum is going to be this little structure in the center and your ribs are going to be further out towards the side so your rib your sternum is going to be medial to your ribs and vice versa your ribs are going to be lateral to your sternum Okay, now let's think about that with something that's not quite so anatomical because I just threw a new term at you. Let's talk about just the side of your trunk right here or the side of your belly and your belly button in the middle. Your belly button is going to be medial to the muscles on the side of your belly right here. And these muscles on the side of your belly are going to be lateral to your belly button. That's towards the middle. Okay? Now, that's when we're referencing, remember, towards midline. So I'm going to give you a little midline with this dotted line. That's what we're referencing, and it goes all the way down to the body. Okay? So if someone has pain, for example, I'll usually talk about pain because as a physical therapist, that's what I deal with a lot with patients, but it doesn't always have to be about pain. But if someone has pain on the side of their hip right here, then let's say two weeks from now, they have pain on their groin. Oh, the pain went from more laterally to more medially. Okay, so it's always in reference to that midline. We can also talk about it, remember we're in anatomical position here, so palms facing forward. So this part of someone's arm is the medial portion of their arm. And this part over here is the lateral portion of their arm. So this is medial, this is lateral, because we're referencing that anatomical position. Remember, with palms facing forward. That can get tricky if you have a patient in front of you, because sometimes they'll say, oh, I have pain right here, and they're going to show you with their palm facing down. But what your job is, is to always kind of translate that into anatomical position, and you'll flip it around and say, oh. In anatomical position with that palm facing forward, even though they're showing it to me on the front side of their body, or what looks like the front side of their body, it's actually back here. So that's going to be posterior forearm pain. Same thing with medial and lateral. So in anatomical position, this right here is my medial forearm because it's closer to my midline. Because in anatomical position, my thumbs... are facing away from midline of my body. Now if I have pain along that pinky side, it's along the medial forearm. But if someone shows you their forearm like this and they say, oh I have pain right here on the pinky side, it seems like, oh that's away from the midline of your body, so it's going to be lateral. Nope, you got to bring them back in your mind, bring them back into anatomical position. And you have pain on that pinky side, okay, that's going to be medial pain. Or pain on the medial side of your forearm. All right. Now we have a few more terms that we're going to learn as well. These are our last directional terms. So we can point to, basically above is going to be called superior. It's also called cranial. And it's also called cephalic. Okay, so. We're superior. Superior is usually the most commonly used term, but I also need you to know the other ones because they're sometimes used in the medical field. Cranial is sometimes used a little bit more in the neurology field. Neal means brain, so it basically means anything closer to the brain, which is the same thing as superior, right? Anything higher up. Cephalic also means toward the head, so it means the same thing. So when we're talking about this, we can also say it in the opposite direction, pointing down. So when we're talking about things lower down, we're going to reference them as being inferior. And then other names for that are caudal. And with this, cranial is usually used as the opposite of caudal. Now this is important because... This is again how we're going to reference different body parts. For example, your hip is up here and your knee is down here. So your hip is superior to your knee. And your knee is inferior to your hip. We can also talk about this, for example, with the shoulder and the elbow. Your shoulder is superior to your elbow because it's higher up when we're talking about anatomical position. And your elbow is inferior to your shoulder because, again, we're talking about anatomical position. Now, this is hard because we can think about, oh, what if a patient is lying down in the supine or prone position? Oh, is something going to switch from being like what we originally thought of as our shoulder being more superior to our elbow? Does that go out the window when someone's lying down because now it's not technically higher? Nope. We always have to reference in terms of anatomical position. So regardless of this patient positioning, I'll separate this out a little bit. So this is, I'm going to put that in a little box to keep it separate. So this is not anatomical position. This is how a person or a patient can be positioned. But we're always referencing anatomical position. So even if someone is lying down supine on their back, their shoulder is always superior to their elbow. Even if they're lying down with their arm over their head. Their shoulder is always superior to their elbow because we're always referencing everything in terms of anatomical position, no matter how the person is standing or sitting or lying in front of us. Now we have a few more terms to review that are just important general anatomical terms. So we have... proximal And that means towards the center. And then we also, in the same way, have distal, which means away from the center. Now, that's going to make more sense in a moment when I give you some examples. Alrighty, so for examples of that. I'll give you a few. We can talk about that in terms of extremities, which when we talk about extremities, we mean arms and legs. So your upper extremities are your arms and your lower extremities are your legs. So let's talk about it in terms of extremities. So an example. Is your elbow is distal to your shoulder? Because we're talking about the center of your body as a reference point. So your elbow is further away from the center of your body than your shoulder is. But we can also talk about another example with proximal. So your elbow is proximal to your wrist because your elbow is closer to the center of your body than your wrist is. Okay, let's use another example. Let's talk about it in terms of the GI tract or your digestive tract. Proximal always means close to the mouth. So, an example is your, let's see, what's a good example? Your stomach, right? Food goes through your stomach before it goes through all of your intestines. So, along that track, your stomach is proximal. to intestines. That's because your stomach is closer to your mouth than your intestines are along that tract. Okay, so we talk about it in the standard, towards center, away from center, for pretty much all body parts, including our extremities. When we're talking about two different things, your GI tract and your heart, which we're going to learn about in a moment. For those two things, it's a little bit different. So proximal means closer to the mouth for GI tract. And you can think about it in the same way as distal means closer to like your anus, because that's the end of that tract. And for your heart or your circulatory system, proximal means close to the heart. So I'm not going to write an example out for that, but basically just note that those blood vessels that are right next to your heart. are proximal to the blood vessels that go all the way out into your fingers. So proximal always means close to the heart. Okay, so in terms of proximal and distal, we're always talking about towards the center of your body or away from the center. But the two things that are a little bit different are digestive tract and our circulatory system. And these are how we decide what proximal means for those two tracks. Now A few more terms that I want to review. Superficial means external or towards the skin. And then deep means internal or away from the skin. So this is how we refer to different things in the body. Again, these are just more anatomical terms. So let's think about your organs. So like your stomach is inside your belly, right? It's inside your abdominal. cavity. Now, if you have pain, or if someone, again, I'm going to use this example of pain, but if someone has pain on their skin, like they get a cut on their belly, right around where their stomach is, that pain is more superficial, or that injury is more superficial than if someone has actual damage to the stomach that's deeper. So your skin is superficial to your stomach, and your stomach is deep to your skin. Alrighty, so last few things for these terms. hypo means below and hyper means above those are usually prefixes so things that come before names and that's important just because that'll help us in terms of name things in anatomy. Now the next part of this anatomical organization lecture that we're going to be talking about is cavities in the body. This is our number four, cavities. Now I'm gonna draw a little person here again. Ooh, he's a little funky looking, but that's okay. Alrighty, so that's our person standing in front of us. And for these different cavities, we're going to use different colors. to represent them. So you have a cavity up here where your brain is and that is your cranial cavity. Now you're going to have a really important muscle that is going to go across the body and it's going to be your big breathing muscle. Right there, that's called your diaphragm. So that's not a cavity, so I'm just going to write it to the side. That is your diaphragm. Oops, diaphragm. That's an R-A-G-M. So that diaphragm helps us breathe but really I'm just drawing it in because it's a marker. It's not one of our cavities, it's a marker that separates different cavities. So for the cavity up here where our lungs and heart are, that's going to be our thoracic cavity. Then where our belly is and all of our intestines are that's our abdominal cavity We're also going to have a pelvic cavity, which is where our pelvis is. And then we're also going to have something called a vertebral cavity, which you can see here, but I'm going to draw in a different view for you as well. So that's our vertebral cavity. So in that different view, I'm going to draw one of our spine bones, which we're going to go in a lot more detail about later. But I'm going to draw one of them because this cavity goes through the center of that spine bone. So here's our little spine bone to the side. And this is a superior view of this spine bone. So this is as if we're looking through someone. Remember how I drew right and left when we were talking about spine bones? about someone in terms of anatomical position. In terms of the front and the back of someone, we're going to talk about it as anterior and posterior, those terms that we just learned. So anterior is the front, so I'm going to be drawing an A for anterior. So this is the front part of this bone, and this is the back part where I'm going to draw P. And this is a superior view, meaning we're looking down from the top. of someone. So anyway, the vertebral cavity goes through this spine bone. And I encourage you to look that up in your textbook or online to see what that vertebral cavity looks like because it'll give you a little more information and we'll review this in lab as well, especially as we go into the different bones. Alrighty, so those are our cavities. We also have linings. So parietal means the lining of a cavity. So any one of those cavities that we talked about above. Invisceral means the lining of an organ. Now, the last thing we're going to talk about in terms of anatomical organization is abdominal regions. Alright, so we're going to talk about this in two different ways. I'm going to draw someone's belly here. And the belly button is going to be right in the center. And for this person's belly, we're going to be looking, remember, the right side is over here and the left side is over there, because we're looking at this person's belly in anatomical position. I'm going to do the same thing over here. Here's the belly button. And for this one, we're going to split it up a little differently. So I'm just going to make this line nice and thick so we know that we're separating between these two different. views of anatomical regions. Alrighty. So let's talk about this first one first. So with this first one, we're splitting it up into four different pieces of someone's abdominal region. Alrighty. So we're going to call Let's see what color do I want to use. Let's use a nice blue. So for this, this is going to be our right upper quadrant and how we're going to write this. Out is R U Q, right upper quadrant. That's how you'll oftentimes see it written out clinically. Now if this is our right upper quadrant, what do you think this one down here is going to be? If you guessed the left lower quadrant, you're right. Left lower. The abbreviation for that is LLQ. Now this one, what do you think this is going to be up there? Right, it's going to be our left upper quadrant. So I'm just going to write that out for us. Left upper quadrant. L U Q and you guessed it this one's gonna be what it's gonna be our right lower r L Q is our abbreviation so this is kind of the easier way to split up the belly into four different slices and it makes sense the upper Quadrants are upper, higher up. The lower quadrants are lower. The right quadrants are right and the left quadrants are left. So now let's get to this this other area. I'm going to draw things at a little bit of a diagonal just so it's easier to fit into the into the little spaces that we have here. So the I'm going to use different colors for this just to make it easier for us. So our belly button in the center here is actually called our umbilicus. So the region is titled the umbilical region. That's the one right in the center, right around your belly button. Now the ones to the sides of the umbilical region, those are going to be called the lumbar regions. But remember, just like we did here, we're looking at anatomical position. This is the right and this is the left. So we're going to do the same thing. This is the right of someone's body or belly and this is the left. Now, this is going to be their right lumbar region, and this is going to be called their left lumbar region. Now, oh, you know what? I was talking about anatomical terms before. And we talked about hypo as below and hyper as above. So I'm going to bring that paper back for us. The other thing that is often used as above is epi. So I'm going to add that in. Epi. is sometimes above the reason i'm telling you that is because that's going to help us out with this this next term that we're going to use so this next one is called the epigastric region because it's above the gastric region so epi gastric is the name of this one above the gastric region We're also going to have hypogastric. Remember, that means below. So that's going to be the one below right here. Hypogastric. Because we're talking about gastric in the center. Epigastric and hypogastric. Now we're also going to have our right iliac. That's named because you have a bone or a part of your bone called your iliac crest, which is right around here on both sides. So that's why this is called the right and left iliac regions. And then lastly, we have one more. And that region is going to be called our hypochondrial. That's because when we're talking about the word chondrial, we're talking about essentially like your ribs. in the cartilage regions there. So remember your ribs are going to be above where your belly is. Your ribs are going to be up here. So these regions right here are below the ribs. ribs. So we're going to be calling them hypochondrial because remember hypo means below and chondrial means ribs. So this is going to be our left hypochondrial and this is going to be our right hypochondrial. Okay, so that wraps it up for our anatomical organization with our two different ways of naming abdominal regions.

Welcome to Human Anatomy. This is our first lecture and we're going to start with a topic of anatomical organization. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to write that title up top.

What I want you to do is follow along with me. I'm always going to write a title up top in all caps like that and then I'll write the different information underneath it and your job is to follow along with me as I go and write things down in your notebook as I do and if you ever need to pause the video of course you can do that to catch up in case I go too quickly. So for anatomical organization we're talking about anatomy and how we define anatomical terms.

So there's something that is called anatomical position, and this is probably the most important piece of the foundation of anatomy because when we're talking about anatomical position, that's how we're going to reference any different body part in its relation to another body part. So I'm going to draw a little guy here. So he's going to have a head and he's going to be facing us and he's going to have chunky hands unintentionally.

So that's my little attempt at drawing a little guy here. Anatomical position is someone standing up facing forward. So we're looking at the front of this person with their hands at their palms at their side. So we're looking at the palms of their hands. Now this is very important because how this person stands is going to determine how we're talking about him.

So I encourage you to look up a picture of anatomical position as well. Note that again, someone's going to be standing up, you're going to be looking at the front of their body, and you're going to be looking at the palms of their hands instead of the back of their hands. And that's what we decided is anatomical position. Now, if we look at this guy, we are again looking at the front of his body, but we're looking at him from our perspective in our eyes.

So when we're looking at him, Our right side of our body is right here and our left side of our body is right here. But when we're facing this person, the right side of his body is right here and the left side of his body is right there. So it's opposite of what the sides are on our own body. So I put a little R there to signify that that is the person's right side. and an L to signify that that is the person's left side.

So remember, it's not going to be the same as what you're looking at on your body. Whenever you're looking at a patient or talking about something in anatomical position, we're usually talking about looking at it from the front. So the sides are going to be switched, okay? So if you have any questions about that, definitely. You feel free to Google things as always, but then you can definitely shoot me an email because this is one of the most important topics as a foundation for anatomy.

Now, in addition to this, we have a couple of different names for how people can be positioned. So one position is called supine, and supine means... someone lying on their back. We also have a position called prone and that means someone lying on their stomach.

So that's separate from the anatomical position but it's just adding things in. So anatomical position is for how we talk about things. and how we discuss body parts in relation to other body parts.

But these different things right here, supine and prone, are positions that a person can be lying in. Alright, so our next thing we're going to talk about is something called sectioning planes. For sectioning planes, that really means how we're cutting up the body.

So it'll make more sense in a moment, but I'm going to draw three little people here. And review what these three different planes are. I'm going to make him smiling because he's happy.

Oops. I made the legs really long on this one and really short on that one. That was not intentional.

But. Basically, we're looking at a front view of someone right here, and then we're looking at a side view of someone right there. Okay, so that's the difference between these things. I'm just going to draw a line to separate. So these are three different planes.

All right. The first plane we're going to be talking about is called transverse plane. But it's also called horizontal. And it's also called axial. So this one's a little more complicated in that it has three different names.

Now let me draw that out for you. This is going to be the plane we're talking about. So we're going to be talking about the plane going across someone's body, and I drew three different green lines to represent this transverse horizontal or axial plane, because this is going to be very important in terms of how we talk about different structures for anatomy. So for these planes, you can kind of almost think about them as a glass sheet that's cutting through someone.

So for this transverse plane, remember, which is also called the horizontal or axial plane, it's as if we're taking a glass plate through this person and sticking it in between them to separate this upper portion from the lower portion of their body. And this will make more sense as we go through our anatomy lessons and we use these planes to describe the locations of body parts and relate them to each other. to others but for now just know that we're using different planes and it's um dividing this one divides the body into the upper or superior portion and lower inferior portion but i have three different green lines because you can talk about the transverse plane in any area of the body so i just drew three as an example all right so our next one is called sagittal plane and then there's also something called made the sagittal so let me explain that after I draw this line through this person So this is our second plane called sagittal.

It's represented by this purple line as if I was taking a glass plate and sticking it into this person. Now this is going to separate their right from their left. Okay, now if there is, you know how with the transverse plane, I showed you three different green lines to represent that you can do this in any part of someone's body. You can also do this to the side here for someone.

but this line going straight down through the middle is cutting a person's body in half. Now that is called mid-sagittal plane, but if we're just cutting a person in half between right and left, but it's not in the center, that's just referred to as sagittal. Alright, now our last sectioning plane that we have for anatomy is called the coronal plane. But it's also called the frontal plane. Oops, I forgot to color this purple.

Now we'll color our coronal plane orange. And this coronal plane. Remember, this person is positioned differently than the other one. These two guys are facing forward. Now this person is facing to the side.

You can see because their nose and their smile and their legs are oriented differently. Now we're going to take this plane. Remember, it's as if we're taking a glass plate and sticking it through someone.

And we're going to slice it through someone like that. So it's going to separate the front and the back of them. So if that helps, that's kind of how we're going to talk about these different planes.

Remember, the transverse plane separates the upper or superior part of someone from the inferior or lower part. The sagittal or mid-sagittal separates the right and left part. And then the coronal. Separates the front and the back. Okay.

Now let's bring in a few terms that are going to be really important as we go through our anatomy learning. Okay, so this is going to be called, these are really going to be our directional terms. And remember, we're still under this title of anatomical organization, but I'm just breaking it up into parts.

I'm going to continue to do this throughout our lectures and do it almost in like an outline style to make sure that we can organize things correctly in our brain, because that's the hardest part oftentimes is organizing things as you're learning anatomy. Alright, so let's learn our directional terms. I'm going to draw a little person here again. So his nose and his smile are always going to tell you where he's facing.

So he's facing this direction to the side. Now we're looking at the front of his body right here and the back of his body right here. So what we're going to call the back side of things is posterior.

Or dorsal. I like to remember that because if you think about a dorsal fin on a dolphin, that's on the back of them. And it really means the back of a person. Now, the front of a person is going to be anterior. or ventral.

So this is very helpful, right? Because if we're talking about this anatomical position that this guy is standing in, remember with his palms facing forward, that's what we're using to reference all anatomical body parts. But we also have to use directional terms in order to make that anatomical position make sense.

So, for example, if I have a patient in front of me and they are having pain. So remember, I'm in anatomical position. My hands are facing forward. If they're having pain right here on their forearm. How are we going to know if we're going to call that anterior or posterior pain?

We're going to know because we always refer to everything in anatomical position. So if a patient is telling me they have pain right here, I'm going to reference anatomical position in my head and say, oh, this is the positioning with a patient standing. and we're looking at the front of them with their palms facing forward, this has to be the front of our forearm when we're looking at anatomical position. Now how do we talk about the front of someone's body using our directional terms? We're going to talk about it as anterior.

So this person will have anterior forearm pain. The only way I'm able to decide that and give it that name So other clinicians will be able to follow along and know where that person is having their pain. is because we referenced anatomical position and our directional terms. Okay, now we're going to talk about a few more of these directional terms. I'm going to draw another person here.

You'll be able to tell that my drawings are very mediocre at times, so hang in there with me. I really just want to draw the form of someone's body here. I don't really care that his legs are all messed up.

Alrighty, so remember we're looking at someone in anatomical position again here. Now what we're going to do is I'm going to draw arrows pointing towards the center of the body. And when we're pointing more towards the center of the body, that's going to be referred to as medial. Now I'm also going to do the opposite in pointing away from the midline of the body. And that's going to be referred to as lateral.

All right. So let's say we're talking about your lower ribs that are about right here. And we're talking about... your something called your sternum which is in the middle of your body right here your sternum is going to be this little structure in the center and your ribs are going to be further out towards the side so your rib your sternum is going to be medial to your ribs and vice versa your ribs are going to be lateral to your sternum Okay, now let's think about that with something that's not quite so anatomical because I just threw a new term at you.

Let's talk about just the side of your trunk right here or the side of your belly and your belly button in the middle. Your belly button is going to be medial to the muscles on the side of your belly right here. And these muscles on the side of your belly are going to be lateral to your belly button.

That's towards the middle. Okay? Now, that's when we're referencing, remember, towards midline.

So I'm going to give you a little midline with this dotted line. That's what we're referencing, and it goes all the way down to the body. Okay?

So if someone has pain, for example, I'll usually talk about pain because as a physical therapist, that's what I deal with a lot with patients, but it doesn't always have to be about pain. But if someone has pain on the side of their hip right here, then let's say two weeks from now, they have pain on their groin. Oh, the pain went from more laterally to more medially.

Okay, so it's always in reference to that midline. We can also talk about it, remember we're in anatomical position here, so palms facing forward. So this part of someone's arm is the medial portion of their arm. And this part over here is the lateral portion of their arm.

So this is medial, this is lateral, because we're referencing that anatomical position. Remember, with palms facing forward. That can get tricky if you have a patient in front of you, because sometimes they'll say, oh, I have pain right here, and they're going to show you with their palm facing down. But what your job is, is to always kind of translate that into anatomical position, and you'll flip it around and say, oh.

In anatomical position with that palm facing forward, even though they're showing it to me on the front side of their body, or what looks like the front side of their body, it's actually back here. So that's going to be posterior forearm pain. Same thing with medial and lateral.

So in anatomical position, this right here is my medial forearm because it's closer to my midline. Because in anatomical position, my thumbs... are facing away from midline of my body. Now if I have pain along that pinky side, it's along the medial forearm.

But if someone shows you their forearm like this and they say, oh I have pain right here on the pinky side, it seems like, oh that's away from the midline of your body, so it's going to be lateral. Nope, you got to bring them back in your mind, bring them back into anatomical position. And you have pain on that pinky side, okay, that's going to be medial pain. Or pain on the medial side of your forearm.

All right. Now we have a few more terms that we're going to learn as well. These are our last directional terms.

So we can point to, basically above is going to be called superior. It's also called cranial. And it's also called cephalic. Okay, so.

We're superior. Superior is usually the most commonly used term, but I also need you to know the other ones because they're sometimes used in the medical field. Cranial is sometimes used a little bit more in the neurology field. Neal means brain, so it basically means anything closer to the brain, which is the same thing as superior, right?

Anything higher up. Cephalic also means toward the head, so it means the same thing. So when we're talking about this, we can also say it in the opposite direction, pointing down.

So when we're talking about things lower down, we're going to reference them as being inferior. And then other names for that are caudal. And with this, cranial is usually used as the opposite of caudal. Now this is important because... This is again how we're going to reference different body parts.

For example, your hip is up here and your knee is down here. So your hip is superior to your knee. And your knee is inferior to your hip.

We can also talk about this, for example, with the shoulder and the elbow. Your shoulder is superior to your elbow because it's higher up when we're talking about anatomical position. And your elbow is inferior to your shoulder because, again, we're talking about anatomical position. Now, this is hard because we can think about, oh, what if a patient is lying down in the supine or prone position?

Oh, is something going to switch from being like what we originally thought of as our shoulder being more superior to our elbow? Does that go out the window when someone's lying down because now it's not technically higher? Nope. We always have to reference in terms of anatomical position. So regardless of this patient positioning, I'll separate this out a little bit.

So this is, I'm going to put that in a little box to keep it separate. So this is not anatomical position. This is how a person or a patient can be positioned. But we're always referencing anatomical position. So even if someone is lying down supine on their back, their shoulder is always superior to their elbow.

Even if they're lying down with their arm over their head. Their shoulder is always superior to their elbow because we're always referencing everything in terms of anatomical position, no matter how the person is standing or sitting or lying in front of us. Now we have a few more terms to review that are just important general anatomical terms.

So we have... proximal And that means towards the center. And then we also, in the same way, have distal, which means away from the center.

Now, that's going to make more sense in a moment when I give you some examples. Alrighty, so for examples of that. I'll give you a few.

We can talk about that in terms of extremities, which when we talk about extremities, we mean arms and legs. So your upper extremities are your arms and your lower extremities are your legs. So let's talk about it in terms of extremities.

So an example. Is your elbow is distal to your shoulder? Because we're talking about the center of your body as a reference point.

So your elbow is further away from the center of your body than your shoulder is. But we can also talk about another example with proximal. So your elbow is proximal to your wrist because your elbow is closer to the center of your body than your wrist is. Okay, let's use another example.

Let's talk about it in terms of the GI tract or your digestive tract. Proximal always means close to the mouth. So, an example is your, let's see, what's a good example?

Your stomach, right? Food goes through your stomach before it goes through all of your intestines. So, along that track, your stomach is proximal. to intestines.

That's because your stomach is closer to your mouth than your intestines are along that tract. Okay, so we talk about it in the standard, towards center, away from center, for pretty much all body parts, including our extremities. When we're talking about two different things, your GI tract and your heart, which we're going to learn about in a moment.

For those two things, it's a little bit different. So proximal means closer to the mouth for GI tract. And you can think about it in the same way as distal means closer to like your anus, because that's the end of that tract.

And for your heart or your circulatory system, proximal means close to the heart. So I'm not going to write an example out for that, but basically just note that those blood vessels that are right next to your heart. are proximal to the blood vessels that go all the way out into your fingers. So proximal always means close to the heart.

Okay, so in terms of proximal and distal, we're always talking about towards the center of your body or away from the center. But the two things that are a little bit different are digestive tract and our circulatory system. And these are how we decide what proximal means for those two tracks.

Now A few more terms that I want to review. Superficial means external or towards the skin. And then deep means internal or away from the skin.

So this is how we refer to different things in the body. Again, these are just more anatomical terms. So let's think about your organs. So like your stomach is inside your belly, right?

It's inside your abdominal. cavity. Now, if you have pain, or if someone, again, I'm going to use this example of pain, but if someone has pain on their skin, like they get a cut on their belly, right around where their stomach is, that pain is more superficial, or that injury is more superficial than if someone has actual damage to the stomach that's deeper.

So your skin is superficial to your stomach, and your stomach is deep to your skin. Alrighty, so last few things for these terms. hypo means below and hyper means above those are usually prefixes so things that come before names and that's important just because that'll help us in terms of name things in anatomy. Now the next part of this anatomical organization lecture that we're going to be talking about is cavities in the body.

This is our number four, cavities. Now I'm gonna draw a little person here again. Ooh, he's a little funky looking, but that's okay.

Alrighty, so that's our person standing in front of us. And for these different cavities, we're going to use different colors. to represent them.

So you have a cavity up here where your brain is and that is your cranial cavity. Now you're going to have a really important muscle that is going to go across the body and it's going to be your big breathing muscle. Right there, that's called your diaphragm.

So that's not a cavity, so I'm just going to write it to the side. That is your diaphragm. Oops, diaphragm. That's an R-A-G-M.

So that diaphragm helps us breathe but really I'm just drawing it in because it's a marker. It's not one of our cavities, it's a marker that separates different cavities. So for the cavity up here where our lungs and heart are, that's going to be our thoracic cavity. Then where our belly is and all of our intestines are that's our abdominal cavity We're also going to have a pelvic cavity, which is where our pelvis is.

And then we're also going to have something called a vertebral cavity, which you can see here, but I'm going to draw in a different view for you as well. So that's our vertebral cavity. So in that different view, I'm going to draw one of our spine bones, which we're going to go in a lot more detail about later.

But I'm going to draw one of them because this cavity goes through the center of that spine bone. So here's our little spine bone to the side. And this is a superior view of this spine bone. So this is as if we're looking through someone.

Remember how I drew right and left when we were talking about spine bones? about someone in terms of anatomical position. In terms of the front and the back of someone, we're going to talk about it as anterior and posterior, those terms that we just learned. So anterior is the front, so I'm going to be drawing an A for anterior. So this is the front part of this bone, and this is the back part where I'm going to draw P.

And this is a superior view, meaning we're looking down from the top. of someone. So anyway, the vertebral cavity goes through this spine bone.

And I encourage you to look that up in your textbook or online to see what that vertebral cavity looks like because it'll give you a little more information and we'll review this in lab as well, especially as we go into the different bones. Alrighty, so those are our cavities. We also have linings. So parietal means the lining of a cavity. So any one of those cavities that we talked about above.

Invisceral means the lining of an organ. Now, the last thing we're going to talk about in terms of anatomical organization is abdominal regions. Alright, so we're going to talk about this in two different ways. I'm going to draw someone's belly here.

And the belly button is going to be right in the center. And for this person's belly, we're going to be looking, remember, the right side is over here and the left side is over there, because we're looking at this person's belly in anatomical position. I'm going to do the same thing over here.

Here's the belly button. And for this one, we're going to split it up a little differently. So I'm just going to make this line nice and thick so we know that we're separating between these two different. views of anatomical regions.

Alrighty. So let's talk about this first one first. So with this first one, we're splitting it up into four different pieces of someone's abdominal region.

Alrighty. So we're going to call Let's see what color do I want to use. Let's use a nice blue. So for this, this is going to be our right upper quadrant and how we're going to write this. Out is R U Q, right upper quadrant.

That's how you'll oftentimes see it written out clinically. Now if this is our right upper quadrant, what do you think this one down here is going to be? If you guessed the left lower quadrant, you're right.

Left lower. The abbreviation for that is LLQ. Now this one, what do you think this is going to be up there?

Right, it's going to be our left upper quadrant. So I'm just going to write that out for us. Left upper quadrant.

L U Q and you guessed it this one's gonna be what it's gonna be our right lower r L Q is our abbreviation so this is kind of the easier way to split up the belly into four different slices and it makes sense the upper Quadrants are upper, higher up. The lower quadrants are lower. The right quadrants are right and the left quadrants are left.

So now let's get to this this other area. I'm going to draw things at a little bit of a diagonal just so it's easier to fit into the into the little spaces that we have here. So the I'm going to use different colors for this just to make it easier for us.

So our belly button in the center here is actually called our umbilicus. So the region is titled the umbilical region. That's the one right in the center, right around your belly button. Now the ones to the sides of the umbilical region, those are going to be called the lumbar regions. But remember, just like we did here, we're looking at anatomical position.

This is the right and this is the left. So we're going to do the same thing. This is the right of someone's body or belly and this is the left. Now, this is going to be their right lumbar region, and this is going to be called their left lumbar region. Now, oh, you know what?

I was talking about anatomical terms before. And we talked about hypo as below and hyper as above. So I'm going to bring that paper back for us. The other thing that is often used as above is epi.

So I'm going to add that in. Epi. is sometimes above the reason i'm telling you that is because that's going to help us out with this this next term that we're going to use so this next one is called the epigastric region because it's above the gastric region so epi gastric is the name of this one above the gastric region We're also going to have hypogastric.

Remember, that means below. So that's going to be the one below right here. Hypogastric.

Because we're talking about gastric in the center. Epigastric and hypogastric. Now we're also going to have our right iliac.

That's named because you have a bone or a part of your bone called your iliac crest, which is right around here on both sides. So that's why this is called the right and left iliac regions. And then lastly, we have one more.

And that region is going to be called our hypochondrial. That's because when we're talking about the word chondrial, we're talking about essentially like your ribs. in the cartilage regions there.

So remember your ribs are going to be above where your belly is. Your ribs are going to be up here. So these regions right here are below the ribs. ribs. So we're going to be calling them hypochondrial because remember hypo means below and chondrial means ribs.

So this is going to be our left hypochondrial and this is going to be our right hypochondrial. Okay, so that wraps it up for our anatomical organization with our two different ways of naming abdominal regions.

Transcript for:Overview of Human Anatomical Organization

Transcript for:
Overview of Human Anatomical Organization