Dissection Redux: Still not safe for reading

OK, here's where things go a bit more below the proverbial surface, now that I've slept and had a chance to think about things.

What I Learned This Spring in Gross Anatomy Lab:

There are a lot more structures than just muscles, bones, and ligaments involved in movement. I spent the last day of the dissection with a colleague from the Kane School working on raising May's (our cadaver) arm above her head. Aside from the obvious difficulties with lack of elasticity in the muscle tissue, we found that most shoulder restriction comes from: 1. tight lats. 2. The tendon of the long head of the triceps sticking to the teres major and minor (see http://www.bartleby.com/107/illus412.html) for this area). 3. The bundle of the brachial artery, radial and ulnar nerves, and associated veins etc. (http://www.bartleby.com/107/illus523.html).

Yeah, your nerves can get tight. You can stretch them with nerve gliding exercises like these. It really does help mobility. We kept trying to figure out what was restricting May's arm, and while I've been doing nerve gliding stuff for a while, this really brought its purpose home to me.

Another really interesting revelation was the effect your life has on your organs. May's chest was very narrow, but the rib cage bulged in the center to accommodate her enlarged heart. The membrane on the inside of the ribs was very, very thick on the right, which must have restricted her breathing. The male cadaver, whom we called Georgi, had intestines that had literally adhered to each other. The manual therapists in the group were fascinated by this because there are techniques for visceral massage that are designed to help with this sort of thing. We movement people made mental notes about the "use it or lose it" principle of movement. It applies to organs, too.

I've known that organs move around each other for a while-- if your organs didn't move at all, your thorax and abdomen would be a solid mass, not the flexible thing it is. So it is important to keep your organs moving as well as your muscles-- not only by bending and stretching and exercising, but by putting your body in different relationships to gravity. Hence all the inversion work in yoga!

I was particularly interested in the relationship of the liver, descending aorta/vena cava, upper psoas, and diaphragm. This is the kind of thing you don't often see in anatomy texts, and is really impossible to get a feel for in 2-D. The perfect fit of the curve of the left half of the diaphragm and the top of the liver is a thing of beauty. And as the aorta/vena cava come down from the heart, they go through the diaphragm and zip right behind the liver. And right below the liver, your right psoas arises. Oh yeah-- and your kidneys sit back there too, hanging out with the upper psoas and posterior diaphragm. Cushioned by, yes, FAT! Which is actually your friend. Not that you should be the size of a house, but fat-phobia is really overrated.

What do all these relationships mean? Right now, they mean "everything really IS connected!" But they also mean that the muscular system affects the cardiovascular system affects the excretory, digestive, and endocrine systems very directly. How, exactly? I'm still working on it.

BTW, if anyone knows bio researchers looking for interesting topics to work on, I'm more than happy to start spouting ideas. I'd love to know more about the interrelationships of the systems myself, and the more scientific proof we have, the better!

More later, I'm sure.

Melissa V.