Last week, I nearly lost my mind...

...trying to learn a physiological concept.

Can you relate? 😅

I've never had it happen quite like this though. See, I've been head-down, laser focused on creating videos and content for my A&P 2 course. It's a grueling pace to create the rest of the course: a new course video every 1.5 workdays. That includes studying, making the slides, animations, filming, and editing.

And I was doing great, until...

Blood clotting.

If you haven't studied the clotting cascade before, let me just say that it involves 13 different "clotting factors" that work together like a complicated set of falling dominoes to cause a clot to form. Here's a sketch I made of the clotting cascade as I was trying to understand it better:

That wasn't the issue though.

The issue was that when I started looking up the confusing aspects that didn't make sense to me...

I soon realized that this whole process, which is how it's taught in every A&P textbook I have (Marieb, Hole's, OpenStax, etc.)...

...is not at all how clotting works in the body.

The way all of our textbooks teach clotting is flat out wrong. 😱

And we've known this for decades.

Now, maybe I'm being slightly sensationalist here. The clotting cascade is useful. It explains the common PT and aPPT tests to help diagnose clotting disorders. It's a simplification of the real thing that's a bit easier for students. It's fine, I guess.

The real thing is called the Cell Based Model of Coagulation, and it makes soooo much more sense. It's slightly more complicated, but not that much more complicated.

I went down a huge rabbit hole trying to figure this all out, asking a cardiologist friend and a fell science YouTuber their opinions on how I should teach it, as well as mapping out the Cell Based Model, which no one else online has figured out how to explain well...

Anyway, I ended up creating a main clotting video for my A&P 2 course that covers the standard clotting cascade, since that's what most A&P 2 students need to know for their exams.

But I had just made this beautiful diagram of the Cell Based Model:

And I couldn't let the 8+ hours I'd spent figuring that all out go to waste.

So I made a YouTube video on the Cell Based Model, exposing the truth THEY didn't want you to know! (Haha, jk, it's not a secret or a conspiracy. It was genuinely surprising how hard it was to parse through and make sense of the current model of clotting in the human body.)

If you're curious to know more about how clotting really works (and what's so incorrect about the old model), you can watch that video here:

​

So now all my clotting videos are done, and I'm moving onto the next system (cardiovascular!) in my A&P 2 course.

I also have a couple more YouTube videos in the works. One on the muscles of the upper arm (using some beautiful 3D models from Anatomage!) and another on hematopoiesis (which I've fiiiinally learned how to spell correctly, ha!).

Hope your semester is off to a great start!

-Justin

P.S. Enrollment in my A&P 2 course is currently closed. I'm planning to open it back up around the end of this month. But in the meantime, my other course/program (The Memory Lab) is open. Here's a comment in the Memory Lab group from last week:

Don't rewrite your notes in pretty colors and then bomb your tests. 😬

Come join me in the Memory Lab, and let me show you the strategies that allow you to learn and actually remember the content your studying. The Memory Lab actually works best if you're currently taking a challenging class like A&P, so you can apply the strategies from the Memory Lab right away with the actual content you're learning. More info here!​