Introduction to Anatomy

Listen with Ryan and James as they sit down and talk through the different ways of learning anatomy to help prepare you for the course! Ryan and James also discuss the reason you learn anatomy on the course, and how this applies to becoming a physiotherapist.

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

so

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

so welcome to it's not just physio podcast today i'm delighted to be joined by ryan hi ryan james me and ryan are going to discuss a bit about how we learn um in terms of us being a student different styles of learning different ways and our experiences of that and there's going to be quite a strong anatomical focus to this podcast because learning anatomy is going to be part of what you do in your first year but we'll discuss a few different areas as well so Let's get into it, shall we? So, Ryan, you're a physio student once upon a time. Yes. Did you learn anatomy on your course? Still am, arguably. But yes, yeah, it's a rite of passage, isn't it? It kind of guides all our practice. But yes, definitely, big area of research, big area of learning in your programme throughout, definitely. And just before we continue, just add a little bit of context both Ryan and myself are physiotherapists ourselves so we're coming at this from clinical experiences as well as teaching experiences as we both teach on the physio course but also as learning as well as we've both been through that student experience itself so as Ryan was just sort of saying there real important part of your learning and I guess with it any sort of memories you have as a student Ryan when you were learning the anatomy of the body yourself and do you remember how you were taught that when you were a student? Yes, so in terms of the teaching and the teaching is difficult because you can come up with lots of weird and wonderful ways but ultimately you're trying to get through all the content to deliver to all the students and there's only a certain number of ways you can get through all of that and to get you on the road to then some self-directed studies so a lot of practical hands-on sessions, a lot of doing models in in lectures doing models in seminars plinths moving each other around with you with your course mates and then in terms of self-directed um having a little brother does help sometimes so getting him to volunteer sticking sticky notes for attachments origins insertions on um on him and more so than anything was just getting to grips and doing it rather than just diving your head into grey's anatomy and trying to remember it trying to remember it that way so yeah a lot of doing and having a willing model volunteer helped for sure and I think you've touched in within that a number of different ways to learn so so interesting love you said you know having a a brother has its benefits tell us a little bit of how you used him in your anatomical learning yeah so when I was kind of doing my fundamental sort of anatomy um it was more sort of And the way I learned, I wasn't very good at lifting lecture notes off and then making that make sense. I was definitely more, how can I practically bring this to life in kind of a 3D way? And I'm sure we'll touch on kind of anatomy packages and computer generated kind of models, but I was very much, I'm going to be treating real life people. I need to practice this on real life people and get in my head, this is how this moves. This is how this works. works this is how it might not work and how that might look different so yeah so even things like trying to if we're going through muscle groups of the lower limb where is the gastrocnemius and I'll stick a sticky note on my brother rip his leg hair off and I'll take the sticky note off again and just go right that's where the gastrocnemius is and what does it do and then I will chat to him whether he likes it or not about this is what it does this is where it attaches and I that's how I learnt it people will learn it and million and one different ways but um yeah so i'm thankful for that um he a willing volunteer at home yeah i didn't have much choice but that's how i learned anyway and that's great to hear so you know for students listening to this straight away ryan's talked about a very practical way of learning anatomy is to you know if you've got a brother or actually at university often we encourage if you've got any friends or your fellow students a real practical 3D way, it can literally be sticky notes with your friend's consent drawing on them, you know, where the muscles are, just so, and that for you, when you said about the movement and the function, was it, how did that sort of, how did you learn from that? Was it just sort of seeing these sticky things move in person or did you associate the words and the colours of the papers? How did that? Yeah, so how that would kind of look is I would get it in almost like an anatomical position of the static that's where it is and then I'd try and progress that on as we went through the learning and through the course of what does it do and by what does it do we sometimes look at that in teaching as sitting on a bed bend your knee move your ankle but actually life isn't like that that looks like going up the stairs reaching to a cupboard and that's how I'd then learn it I'd and go, right, I know where it is now. when someone is reaching for a cereal bowl out of the drawer, what movement is going on there? And I was trying to relate it all the time to practical movements. Yeah, you have to do the isolated stuff, which kind of helps you learn it, but it was always kind of bringing it back to functional anatomy. Why is this working this way? Which then is how it manifests itself in the patients you see when you graduate. No, and I think it's absolutely functional is the key part we want our students to really embrace in this all three years and onwards but certainly the first year the function I think is the most important part as you said seeing a movement and trying to understand how does that ankle move where is it going what's it doing in this moment going up the stairs is the foot moving upwards or downwards or sideways and getting an understanding of that first is probably the real sort of the most important part isn't it going forwards I think I don't know if you were the same when you were learning anatomy I think when you start learning anatomy you find yourself people watching all the time because people move and get around their day to day life in really weird and wonderful ways which is completely normal to them and I found myself doing that whether I was waiting for a train oh they're walking a little bit different to how that person is walking or they're going up those stairs different to how that person goes and you find yourself doing that I think when I was learning anatomy all the time I found myself doing that and you begin to then get an appreciation of anatomy isn't via a textbook someone's version of normal is normal for them compared to you or I and yeah you find yourself doing a lot of people watching I found anyway no absolutely and that's going to be a very big part of the job going forward so you're going to have to watch people and watch how they move and certainly getting into that early doors can be a really good sort of scaffold for your future learning and future careers and I think probably just to kind of give a little bit of context at this point before we go on to other ways of learning and for example anatomy but right let's talk a little bit about why is it important that students learn anatomy why do you think that you know what's this going to help them do through the course and going on into their careers why do you think it's important so anatomy fundamentally underpins without making a too bold a statement fundamentally underpins everything that you're going to do as a physio and whether that is musculoskeletal neuro cardiovascular respiratory moving on into other specialist disciplines it provides the why and ultimately you need to provide a justification for what what you're looking at or what you think is going on, what you're assessing, what does that mean, and then what you're going to do about it. And for all three of those things, you need to have an understanding functionally of the anatomy that is involved. Because if you don't, how are you then able to assess this patient and get them to understand what's going on, how are you going to give them some exercises which you think are going to help. If you don't have that fundamental understanding, you're not going to get past that really basic level of identification really. So yeah, without putting too fine a point on it, it kind of drives everything you will do as a physio. Very well said. And so we know that it is important. And as you say, function and the why, and that's really the key of how things, watching things, seeing how things start to work is a great foundation for your future careers. And And I think certainly in year one, there was a module called human functioning, which is very much about how things move and looking at that. So this is a really nice way that that ties into that. But there's also a couple of other modules as well, like principles of rehab and individual health evaluation, which also very much involve how things move and why as well. So having some understanding of anatomy is really important. Brian, what do you think about how important is it to remember every single muscle and every single name and every single attachment and things like that? What do you think about that? I think the key word, and we're going to use this word probably a lot, and we use it a lot with the students, it's functional, is how does this work and what does it mean? So there will be, and I was a student, I had the same concerns going into my first year of, oh, crikey, well, I need to know every origin, insertion, nerve supply, blood supply. If you went through doing all that, then you're a genius. There's a lot of stuff to remember. and you will come to appreciate that when you start to learn about the body there's a lot of stuff to remember so it's all about function it's all about why is this moving this way and what does it mean so do you need to know every origin and insertion for that no you don't but you need to know what normal and abnormal probably looks like and then you need to probably have an idea of how you're going to go about assessing that and fixing it And it's interesting. I was helping out on our summer school recently, and we touched a little bit on anatomy around the ankle. And one of the students basically said to me, so let me get this right. If you want to be a nerd, you learn all the complicated names. And if you don't, and learning the function and how things move, that's all right. And I was like, well, kind of. Because in a way, as a clinician, Ryan, how often are you quoting muscle groups to patients for their understanding? I don't know. Do you find that works or do you find you do a lot of it or not? No, you're not really. And language and communication is something you'll develop as a student, but you definitely develop it as a practitioner as well. And ultimately, when you're dealing with patients, they're just wanting to know, what's wrong with me? How long is it going to take? How am I going to fix it, basically? And the language you then use is going to be simple, informative to the point so they understand what is going on. If you start reeling off a load of Latin muscle groups, they're probably not going to, the shutters will probably come down and they'll probably get disengaged. So, yeah, don't be worrying about that. You don't have to go on a Latin course before you start this course. It's all about function. It's all about making it applicable to what you're doing. And I think, just to add a little bit of context, if you end up learning learning these muscles, I personally don't think anyone's nerdy for doing that. And I would probably say if that's the case, then I was one. But this is where we go into slightly different ways of learning. So Ryan has explained really well how he liked this functional approach, looking at how things moved, you know, and seeing that as a real picture in play. There are other ways of doing it. So you mentioned about Grey's Anatomy. Now, I remember when I was getting that Grey's Anatomy textbook and very early on, we had to I remember in our first week, this is how things changed, I guess, but we were told, you've got to learn everything there is about the ankle by Friday, and there'll be a test on it. And blimey, didn't that put a bit of anxiety on people? A bit like, oh my gosh. And as you know, there's a lot of anatomy about anatomy. But there are some really good textbooks and books, and people do learn very well by looking at these things and seeing things illustrated and labelled and people do learn that way also, don't they? Absolutely, yeah. And a lot of my course mates would look at textbooks you've used, Grace, and ask me an example there. There's Past Anger and Psalms. There's so many others you could reel off now. And a lot of students would literally rewrite the book in their own notes. So if there was a diagram in there, they would draw the diagram because that helps them to kind of understand, okay, I'm now doing it myself. I kind of get an idea of what's going on. And then they'd annotate. annotates it, rather than just lifting the text directly, they'd annotate it in language that makes sense to them, to then learn it. So, yeah, a lot of my course mates did that and found it really effective. And then also as well, the books is one thing, but the great thing also about online packages that we now have, obviously there are Google and other search engines where you can pretty much write anything anatomical and you can find pictures, can't you? But there's also things like Anatomy TV and packages like that, which also give a real insight into how things work in a more clinical base, working through an application. Have you had a go at that yourself, Franz? Yeah, so Anatomy TV was around when I was a student, so it's still going strong. What Anatomy TV is great for is lifting it from a textbook And I think it's a really good go-between before then trying to apply it to a real-life model or person or whatever. It allows you to peel back those layers of, okay, your understanding of joints might be pretty good, but your understanding of where muscles attach and work on those joints might need a bit of work. So you can then layer that up and see, right, this is how this attaches. And what anatomy TV and packages like that are really good for is you can strip it all back or you can build it back up and you can go at your own pace. And that's where those packages are really, really useful. And when the students start here, there is often, we use anatomy TV, there might be a different package to use, but the idea is that they should be able to get access to that early on. And we'd certainly encourage people to have a go and a play with that. And the nice other thing we have here at the School of Health Sciences, we actually have our own anatomy suite. So we actually have a proper laboratory up at the top of the hospital where there's timetabled, very important timetabled sessions where the students get to go in and actually have a look at real-life anatomy. Have you had any experience of doing that? So I have post-graduation, but not as a student. I must say it's a big perk of the University of Nottingham having that available because it is not by any means a common thing in the UK to have that available. So... It's something I did. There's Surgeon's Hall up in Edinburgh, which is a very similar kind of thing. Very interesting place. I'll give it a plug. I'm not affiliated, but a very good place to go to. But having that available as a student is fantastic because it does allow you then, you might have an ask me TV, you might have textbooks, you might practice on a coursemate or housemate or sibling, but actually then seeing it in action and how it works and what that looks like is invaluable. So it's a great a resource to have here as a student. So, I mean, so you're probably listening to this, you'll start to see that there are these very specific timetabled sessions for you to have a look at real-life anatomy. There'll be a supportive interactive programme to use as well to have a look at anatomy. You'll be directed, they have a certain website which have anatomy on them, but you can also do your own searching from that. There's also the very realistic of actually getting hands-on with each other and starting to actually feel anatomy and see how it moves. There's textbooks. There's loads of these options. You made me remember, I remember when, and this is how it was when I was a student, saying we didn't really, I think we had one go at the anatomy suite. It was never timetabled in as regular as it is now. But there was a show called, I think it was Body Works. Do you remember though? I think they still happen where they sort of have these museum of bodies where it's been the They've been preserved, haven't they, in a certain way. You can go and walk around in all these. They've got veins and arteries and systems as well. I think they do one in the Netherlands, but I think they've got one in London, Manchester, I think, or something like that. It's another option for students. Not to say they've got to suddenly book a plane to fly to the Netherlands, but again, these are nice things to put together and have an experience at. So, with this in mind, is there any other areas that you've looked into, Ryan, yourself, in terms of when learning and has there been any other sources that you can think of that might be available? What I use now and what students will be a lot more familiar with than when I learned and when you learned, the use of social media. You have to use that as a caveat. You need to be careful where you're getting your information from and why someone might be posting something and what affiliations they've kind of got. But things like Twitter, TikTok. For learning anatomy now, there's so many informative good videos YouTube to learn this stuff as long as you're careful about what the source of the information is it's fantastic so if you're catching the train into university and you've got half an hour on the train going through TikTok or anatomy tutorials fantastic there's no set lane as to how you do that learning and they're really good for just refreshing yourself on okay I'll just go through that I've got a bit of spare time I've got 10 minutes so yeah social media now is fantastic to get to get that information from yeah absolutely right and and i don't know if you you know we often we've used in the past you know physio tutors which is you know online free online service of a really good resource when looking at things like clinical tests but often covers anatomy as part of that it's just an example isn't it but you're absolutely right there's there's lots of different um different things that you can that you can often use and obviously part of the university will be able to

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Thank you.

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advise certain areas to look at for own learning but yeah it's a really good point actually that's another way of learning anatomy too and I think what's important to state isn't it is that as students we are not asking you and it is not a requirement to learn all the human anatomy in the body by year one or two or three actually or even after when you're finished what do you think about absolutely neither of us will know everything about the human body and if we do we will probably be working at NASA or somewhere like that you still learn even upon graduation you're learning all the time because in practice you'll still see something that's really funky and you'll be like I've not seen that before that's interesting I've seen this before which might be similar and you kind of draw on that experience but then you will be tapping into other clinicians to gain their expertise on a certain so it's a really good point to make is that by no means is there an expectation that you have to know everything about the human body because that is absolutely impossible and there's a reason that we have new research that comes out all the time about lots of different things is because the smartest brains in the world definitely smarter than myself definitely probably smarter than everyone at the university are still trying to figure out how the human body works and will never probably master it so definitely Definitely as a first-year student, you don't have to worry about mastering it either. No, well said, well said. And you can end up having, and often I think this is the majority of videos, they can end up having incredibly successful, safe, effective, brilliant careers without having an overly polished anatomical edge. However, there are people who really enjoy that line of it and there is absolutely no problem in in increasing your practice and increasing your learning through that, but it goes back to what we said at the beginning. If you can't understand the function on why something moves or how something moves, knowing the name of the muscle groups isn't really that important. And one thing I would say as an example is, it's a bit like if you're, say, learning to drive. If I said to you, Ryan, you drive, before you got into the car, did you learn everything about when the motor car was made and all the parts in your car and what all their names were and how they fitted together? Absolutely not. Put my hands at 10 to 2. That was it. That's on the steering wheel. That's all I was focusing on. Yeah. Right. And then what did you do? You started doing it. Did it? Yeah. Yeah, just practice. Right. Practice, practice, practice. Yeah. Right. So you understood how the car moved because you were moving it. You understood how the brake worked and those things. And it's kind of the principles we're trying to sort of get through. It wouldn't have mattered if you'd known what a V8 means or whatever like that if you don't know where the brake is. So keep that in mind that, yes, there might be some of you who will naturally remember, some of you will come into the universe, no doubt having had an injury and will know a name of a muscle or a ligament or something like that. That's fantastic. And if that helps you, no problem at all. But I think what we're trying to really make it clear is we don't want you all panicking and spending all your time learning names and words when it comes to, say, your exams at the end of first year, which is all about fun. you don't know how it gets put together. Would that be a fair summary? Absolutely. You'd spend your time better than trying to cram all that in than just when someone in your house is moving about, just go, how are they doing that? I wonder. And then delve a little bit into how they're doing that. And you'd be surprised how your knowledge then starts to lay on top of each other. And that's a great example. And one thing to lastly say here at the university, We have these specialist practice rooms available for students up on the C floor here at Queen's Hospital to practice. So you might be able to practice on your housemates and things like that. But we actually have these rooms that you can book out for free and they're exactly designed. So anything you see in your lessons and your practicals and you think, I really want to continue to try that, book them out and we'll show you how to book them out. And if there's a member of staff around and you want to bring them up and say hey could you just like go through that thing with me again that's what we're here for as well so you know again lots of resources in terms of that I guess hopefully we've got we're getting the message through that function is key but Ryan is there any other points that you want to bring forward about ways that you've learned anatomy important things about it general learning going forwards for students anything like that I think just have an appreciation on spend a little bit of time to understand how you think you learn already, whether that has been through primary school, secondary school, A-levels, college, whatever. And just spend a little bit of time to think how best you learn, because that's going to be completely different for all of you. And don't try and force your learning style to change just because you think you've got a lot of anatomy to then all of a sudden learn. Make it fit to you. You'll all learn it in weird and wonderful ways. Don't worry about what someone next door how they're learning it it's your journey it's your degree and it's your career so however you best learn stick with it that's your jam and it'll work for you I think it's a great way to summarise it Ryan it's been a pleasure be great to see how things go this year and we'll see how the students get on with their learning but obviously we're all here as a team to help embrace all those different styles and to move forward and it'll be an exciting journey. It will. Enjoy it. That's the move.