I took a day off yesterday* in order to continue my nutrition studies. I
breezed through the section on the cardiovascular system then followed it by
the musceloskeleton system. I tried working on the immune system, which is
much more interesting than the musceloskeleton system and also more intimately
connected to nutrition (undernutrition interferes with the immune system) but
there was simply too much to learn in one go.
Whilst answering the multiple choice questions for these systems, I realised with
a very heavy heart that the course requires memorising the material but
not necessarily understanding it. The musceloskeleton system material
was very much a 'naming of the parts' that makes learning hard but barely
contributes to understanding (if not directly hindering).
I noticed a few ambiguities in the texts that were brought to my attention by
some of the questions. As I asked, What is the difference between "formation of red blood cells" and
"production of red blood cells" (apart from the fact that they have
different names)? Formation and production appear to be synonyms.
The final answer that I received was that
Haematopoiesis refers to the process through which the body
manufactures blood cells. It begins in the embryo and continues for life. This
refers to all blood cell types (red, white and platelets). Each of these cells
begins with the transformation of hematopoietic stem cells.
Erythropoiesis in its simplest definition is the production of red
blood cells. It is the process which produces red blood cells (erythrocytes),
from erythropoietic stem cell to mature red blood cells.
Formation/production/manufacture are all interchangeable. The important factor
is the difference between Haematopoiesis and Erythropoiesis.
So now you know.
The section on the immune system contained a video delivered by someone whose
native language appears to be French. His heavy accent made understanding what
he was saying difficult but there were sub-titles that purported to show what
he was saying - except that they didn't and contained so many mistakes that I
had to give up watching. 'Thymus' (a gland that is part of the immune system)
was one time rendered as 'virus' (which really got me head scratching) and
another time as 'time is'. There were so many mistakes that I complained on
the discussion board for this section; this morning I read that the sub-titles
have been corrected and that one can download the slides of the lecture. I
think that I'll stick with the slides.
If I'm already talking about the subject of lecturers' accents, then I should
recall that in one of the initial lectures about the GI tract, the lecturer
(Dutch) kept on calling the second part of the small intestine yeyunum,
instead of
jejunum. I
could understand confusion about pronounciation if it were called the gegunum
(is that a hard or soft g?), but the j makes it clear how to pronounce this.
So why did the Dutch lecturer 'replace' the j with a y? Unnecessary confusion.
* Although this didn't stop several people from work telephoning me.
This day in history:
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