Digestive System

Every time I teach the digestive system as part of the medical terminology module, the students are confusing and making mistakes into two things. The first one is the correct order of the alimentary canal organs, and the second one is the confusion between the alimentary canal organs and the digestive system organs. That is why I will try to explain this question in this post.

 

Q. A digestive organ that is not part of the alimentary canal is the.

a.      Stomach.

b.      Liver.

c.      Small intestine.

d.     Large intestine.

e.      Pharynx.

 

 

Correct answer;

So may questions we can create related to this topic. If you know the answer, so that means you know many things about the digestive system. Let start with the meaning of alimentary? According to Mosby’s dictionary, alimentary means something to nourish or to feeds, and the canal is the passage or channel, so together, the meaning of the alimentary canal is the passage that feeds or nourishes the body.  How is it related to the digestive system? What is the function of the digestive system? The digestive system functions are ingesting, digesting, absorbing, and excreting. The body needs to have a continuous, coiled, hollow muscular tube that winds through the ventricle body cavity and is open at both ends to do the job of the digestive system. This coiled, hollow muscular tube is called the alimentary canal. The alimentary canal also called the gastrointestinal tract (GI), starting from the mouth as the canal opening.

We can follow the correct order of the alimentary canal as below;

 

1. The mouth

2. The pharynx

3. The esophagus

4. The stomach

5. The small intestine, (duodenum, jejunum, and ileum)

6. The large intestine, (cecum, ascending colon, transverse colon, descending colon, sigmoid colon)

7. The rectum

8. The anus

 

Try to look at the image to understand the correct order of the alimentary canal.

Now, back to your question and the choices you have. One choice is not part of the alimentary canal, which is the liver. The liver is part of the accessory digestive organs, which they are working along with the alimentary canal to do the digestive system job. They are; teeth, salivary glands, pancreas, liver, and gallbladder are; together with the alimentary canal, they are make up the digestive system.

One thing left to explain it about the digestive system. Every time I taught this system to my students, they are struggling in the small intestine correct order. Every time there is a test in the digestive system, there is a question about the correct order of the small intestine, and unfortunately, the students answer the wrong answer. To make things easy to remember, the correct order of the small intestine, which they are (duodenum, jejunum, and ileum). I asked the students to take the first letters from the term duodenum, which is D, and the first letter from the term jejunum is J; if we are binding them together, we will have (DJ). (DJ) is something trendy, no one would forget it. These two letters will present the duodenum as the first part of the small intestine, then the jejunum the second part and the last part is the ileum. After that, believe or not, no one made any mistake about the order of the small intestine.