A 60-year-old man is unable to walk more than 100 yards without experiencing severe pain in his left leg; the pain is relieved by resting for 5–10 minutes. He is told that the arteries of his leg are becoming occluded with fatty material and is advised to have the sympathetic nerves serving that body region severed. Explain how such surgery might help to relieve this man's problem.

Video transcript

Hello, everyone and welcome to today's video. So a doctor advises an elderly woman who has o included the arteries in her right leg to cut the smp pathetic nerves that serve the limb. This will relieve her of the pain that she is suffering. Because as answer choice A we have, it will open up the blood flow to the arteries. B It will reduce the vasoconstrictor tone of the sympathetic nerves. C it will reduce the vasodilation, tone of the sympathetic nerves. And then as Z we have both A and B. So we are told from the problem that these elderly woman is going to have these OED arteries in her right leg which are constructing blood flow. Now, the doctor is presenting her with the opportunity of cutting this sympathetic nerves that are going to be serving the limp. Now, what effect is going to have? Cutting the sympathetic nerve on the woman's limb? Well, this is going to be decreasing the vassal constrict or tone that the sympathetic nerves have and this is going to allow blood flow to enter the limb. Now, let's go over each of our answer choices so that we may solve this problem. First of all, we have a, it will open up the blood flow to the arteries where we said that there will be an increase in blood supply from the decrease in the vasoconstrictor tone of the sympathetic nerve. So we cannot cancel this out. This is actually going to be a correct statement. Let's move on. Then we have b it will reduce the vassal constrictor tone of the sympathetic nerve. Well, this is just what we wrote down here. This is a true statement. So we're going to be moving on as well. Then we have C it will reduce the viso dilation tone of the sympathetic nerve. Well, we said that it was going to be the vassal constrictor tone that's going to be reduced, not the viso dilation zone. So we're going to cancel this out because this is an incorrect statement. Now, since we were not able to cancel out A or B, the correct statement for this question is going to be D which is both A and B. I really hope this video helped you and I hope to see you on the next one.