Saturday Studying :)

Here's something kind of weird and really off the wall - one of the teachers in my spinal analysis class suggested I start sleeping with my spine! LOL
I've only done it once so far but it worked out pretty well. I stuck my model spine inside a pillow case so the pillow acted as the thorax and the pillow case was like the skin. I sleep on my side and have a couple pillows support my arm (i guess they take the place of a real person but then my hand rest right on the spine. There is no vertebrae protuberance on C1 so, I just start feeling the spine and counting out vertebrae, all the way down to L5 then count back up.

C6 is pretty easy to find on a real person. If you place three fingers along a person's spine up by the neck and then tilt your patient's head forward and back, C6 (the 6th cervical vertebrae) noticeable slides forward so then you know where both C6 and C7 are located and T1 is right underneath C7.

I always think breakfast, lunch and dinner when it comes to the top 3 regions of the spine to remember how many vertebrae are in each section, 7, 12 and 5 correspond to breakfast, lunch and dinner and that's how many vertebrae are in each section.

The cervical vertebrae have holes in the parts of their bony processes that stick out to the side and arteries run through those holes.

There have been some ongoing studies by a couple of MD's on chiropractic adjustments made to the first two vertebrae with regards to decreased blood pressure. Adjustments made on the Atlas and Axis (those are the names of the first two cervical vertebrae) have been shown to have an effect on blood pressure equivalent to two blood pressure drugs. The initial study was done with about 75 people and exams 8 weeks later showed an average drop in systolic bp of 17 points if I recall correctly. The positive findings have warranted a much larger study and is currently in progress.

I'll probably take tomorrow off from lifting and hit legs again on Monday.

One interesting thing from Histology was that ATP is actually cause for a muscle to relax after contraction. We just had a general overview in that class. Also, in biochem, what I've always heard as the Creb's Citric Acid cycle is referred to as the TSA cycle - that's going to be an interesting cycle to get down, along with the metabolic functions of the liver. glycolosis or something like that (I was reading ahead a bit) :)

another interesting thing is that all those transverse processes and other bony protrusions that stick out of all our vertebrae are actually used as levels and we have muscles attached to all those levers and its how we are able to move, twist and rotate our upper body. The intervatebral disc between each of our vertebrae have a nucleus inside of them (nucleus pulposus or np) the outer membrane of our disc are thicker in the front than in the back. In the mornings it's best to lean back slightly to stretch which helps center the np by pushing it forward.

We are most vulnerable to "slipped disc" in the morning time and the most dangerous motion we can perform is bending forward and twisting to the side, especially in the morning. This made me think of a few times I had twinges of pain and sure enough, it would be in the shower which is early in the morning and in would lean forward and twist to the left to grab a bottle of shampoo. I'm right handed so I would be reaching across my body to get the shampoo which further enunciated the twisting motion and along with bending forward would seem to throw my back out with lots of little pain receptors firing to let me know I had done something wrong - of course, I never really knew what was going on until my Spinal Anatomy class.

anyway, leaning back in the mornings and making sure to bend the legs when picking something up is a good idea.

Those intervetebral disc (IVD's) kind of get reinflated with water via osmosis everytime we sleep or lay down. compressive axial forces need to be removed in order for the disc to rehydrate with water and it takes about 5 hours of a horizontal position to allow those disc to fill back up with water. throughout the night the volume of fluid held by those disc increases about 240%

oh well, I guess I'll get back to studying. I think I'll put a t-shirt over my pillow encased spine tonight to increase the thickness between my fingers and the spine to help improve my sense of touch.