chavelle99
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Post by chavelle99 on Dec 2, 2015 0:20:32 GMT
So a person is in a car crash suffered a chest injury that resulted in a collapsed lung. Why would removing the air from the thoracic cavity help the lung to re-inflate?
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charakacomplex
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Post by charakacomplex on Dec 11, 2015 21:24:52 GMT
That's because the air in the thoracic cavity (pneumothorax) is pushing against the lung. This makes it so that the lung can't expand as much as it should be able to. When you aspirate the air in the thoracic cavity, you're giving the lung back the room it needs to expand fully.
Pneumothorax is very common in trauma patients such as your car-crash victim. It's called tension pneumothorax, because the tension/pressure in your thorax goes up.
You can remember this by using a little help from the definition of pneumothorax (aka collapsed lung).The lung is collapsed because something is pressing against it. That something is the air that's stuck in the thoracic cavity. Obviously, the first treatment that comes to mind is to stick a needle in their chest and aspirate the air.
Hope it helped. Coincidentally, we're currently doing the pulmonary system in physiology and anatomy, so this was a good revision for me too.
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