We've been talking about a number of ways to name regions of the body in very specific ways. Now, we want to talk about things a little bit more generally, and to do that, we're going to be using the abdominal pelvic quadrants and regions. Alright. Abdominopelvic, your abdomen and your pelvis together. You have a lot of stuff going on in there, really the majority of your internal organs. And sometimes you may want to name a region of that area without naming a specific thing. For example, if a patient has pain, you might want to say generally where it is, but you don't know what's causing it. Or if during a dissection you want to look at something, but you don't know exactly what you're looking at, but you want to direct someone to a particular region, you can use these words. So we're going to start out just by saying for simplicity, anatomists sometimes use more general terms for regions of the abdomen and the pelvis, and there are going to be 2 ways to do this. Now, like anything, check your notes, know what your professor wants you to be responsible for. Usually, it's both of them. Alright. We'll start out with the abdominal pelvic quadrants.
The abdominal pelvic quadrants well, there's going to be 4 quadrants. That makes sense. That's what quadrants means. Right? So for the quadrants, we're just going to draw this line up and down and a line across, both of them going through the navel or the belly button, and we get 1, 2, 3, 4 quadrants. The quadrants tend to be preferred by the medical community. They're also a little bit easier to learn because there are only 4 of them, and they use pretty logical English language terms to name them. Now we also have the abdominal pelvic regions. There are going to be 9 regions, and you get these regions by basically drawing a Tic Tac Toe board there on that abdominopelvic region. Now the abdominopelvic regions this tends to be preferred by anatomists because they're more specific. They're also a little bit harder to learn because there are 9 of them instead of 4, and they're going to use Greek and Latin roots. Alright. Because that's going to be a little bit more difficult, we'll spend more time on it in a future video. Right now I want to look at these abdominopelvic quadrants. Alright. So the abdominopelvic quadrants, we can see here. We'll say again they're divided at the midline and the navel. We can see that here. We just drew this cross, sort of right to the belly button there.
To name these quadrants, well, each quadrant name includes just three words, and it's going to be very straightforward. The first word is right or left. Now the only tricky part here remember, it's the body's right or left, not yours. So this would be the right, and this would be the left. The second word is going to be upper or lower, and the third word is always quadrant. Alright. So to make this even easier, you don't have to write out all the words. You can just abbreviate it. So for example, we can see here the right upper quadrant. We can just write this as the RUQ. Alright. Now to finish this off, let's put those abbreviations on our anatomical model here. Well, the right upper quadrant, the RUQ, that would be here, RUQ. Next, we'll look here. Well, this is on the left, it's upper, and it's a quadrant, so that's the LUQ. We'll go down, and here we are on the right. It is lower, and it is a quadrant, the RLQ. And here we are on the left. It is lower, and it is a quadrant, so it's the LLQ. Alright. We'll practice this a little bit more, an example and practice problems to follow, and then we will look at those 9 abdominopelvic regions in more detail. I'm looking forward to it. I'll see you there.
