Anatomy & Physiology

What this covers

• Anatomical position, directional terms (superior/inferior, proximal/distal, medial/lateral) and the body planes and cavities used to describe location
• The four primary tissue types and how epithelial, connective, muscle and nervous tissue each match a specific job
• Tracing blood through both circuits: chambers, valves, pulmonary versus systemic flow, and where gas exchange actually happens
• Negative and positive feedback loops using thermoregulation, blood glucose, blood pressure and labour contractions as worked examples
• Mechanism of skeletal muscle contraction (sliding filament, actin, myosin, calcium and ATP) and how muscles work in antagonistic pairs
• Nervous versus endocrine control: action potentials and synapses compared with hormone release, target cells and response time

Where learners get stuck

Reading 'negative feedback' as something harmful or as a system shutting down

The everyday meaning of 'negative' overrides the technical one. In physiology it simply means the response reverses the change, and this is the normal, healthy mode for temperature, glucose and blood pressure. Students who miss this often mislabel childbirth or blood clotting as negative feedback because those outcomes seem positive.

Assuming all arteries carry oxygenated blood and all veins carry deoxygenated blood

The rule is taught as a shortcut before the pulmonary circuit is introduced, so the pulmonary artery and pulmonary veins look like exceptions that break the rule. The actual definition is directional — arteries carry blood away from the heart — and until that replaces the oxygen-based definition, students misroute blood on every heart diagram.

Using directional terms from the viewer's perspective instead of the body's

On a diagram or a screen, the specimen's left is on the reader's right. Students also forget that terms like proximal and distal are always defined relative to the trunk in standard anatomical position, so a bent arm or a face-down figure produces confident but reversed answers.

What a session looks like

A typical session opens with a few recall questions on the previous system, then moves to one focused mechanism — say, tracing a red blood cell from the vena cava to the aorta, or explaining what happens to blood glucose after a meal. Evelyn asks you to talk through the steps in order and stops you at the point where the chain breaks rather than supplying the answer. Diagrams and structure lists are worked through verbally, with labelling checked by having you describe position using proper directional terms. Sessions usually end with one applied scenario — dehydration, a torn ligament, high altitude — that requires linking two systems.

Helpful to know first

• Basic cell structure and organelle function
• Familiarity with diffusion, osmosis and concentration gradients
• Understanding that cells form tissues, tissues form organs and organs form systems
• Comfort with simple chemical ideas such as pH, oxygen and carbon dioxide transport, and the role of ATP

Questions

Is Anatomy & Physiology harder than regular biology?

It is less conceptually abstract than genetics or evolution but carries far more vocabulary and requires you to hold multi-step pathways in order. Students who cope well with memorisation but struggle to explain mechanisms tend to find the physiology half the harder part.

Do you need to have taken biology first?

It helps but is not essential at this level. What matters is knowing cell structure, diffusion and the tissue-organ-system hierarchy. Sessions can cover those foundations first if they are shaky.

How do I memorise all the bones, muscles and structures?

Grouping by function and location works better than alphabetical lists, and saying structures aloud in a pathway order — for example, air from nostril to alveolus — fixes sequence and spelling at the same time. Sessions use spoken recall for exactly this reason.

Can this help with a course that includes dissection or lab practicals?

It can prepare the identification and terminology side — knowing what you are looking at, what plane a section was cut in, and how a structure relates to its neighbours. The physical dissection itself has to happen in your lab.