 Welcome back, dear viewers of Morning Barakah. Kind of really continuing the health and wellness discussions. We're going to be focusing more on the human body now, in particular the lungs, because a lot of times we kind of focus on the heart, the mind or the brain and the stomach, but actually when it comes to the lungs and the functions of the lungs, what more do we need to know? What really do we need to know about the lungs for us to be well informed about this particular area? Luckily, we have with us a different of the channel, but also an expert in this field, Dr. Saeed Yasser Madani. We are very, very grateful to have you on the show. Assalamu alaikum. How's things? Are you okay? Alhamdulillah. Thank you very much. So we are, the theme through this series is going to be focusing on the lungs. And really, I suppose people don't really, as Ali was saying, we don't really focus on so much. We're just thinking about the heart, the brain. Really from a sort of a basic level for, you know, if you're a medic, most of us are, you know, non-clinical. So what's the functions of the, what's the important functions of the lungs for us to sort of learn from? Thank you very much for inviting me. I hope the viewers find this useful, inshallah, at home. As you said, we don't focus on the lungs as much as we do. For example, the heart and other parts of the body. Perhaps before we talk about the function of the lungs, maybe if we can talk about the anatomy of the lungs a bit, because that will nicely lead on to how the lungs work, which then sets a precedence for the remainder of the episodes, which is about different lung conditions. And once we've understood a bit about how the lungs work and a bit about the anatomy, then hopefully we understand those conditions a bit better. So we have two lungs, and in fact our viewers can see diagram number one. We have two lungs, one on the right and one on the left. The one on the right has three lobes, which essentially are three parts. The lung on the left has two lobes or two parts. The reason why the left lung is a bit smaller is because we have the heart on that side as well, on the left side. And then there is a tube, which is the windpipe. The medical word for it is the trachea. And that essentially connects our nose and our mouth to the lungs. So you can actually feel your tube going down the throat. So part of the tube is actually outside the lung, and part of it is inside the lung. And the tube is supported by cartilages, which keep it strong and upright. And those cartilages are C-shaped. C-shaped around the pipe. Almost like a horseshoe. And you can feel them if you press along the front part of your trachea or your windpipe. The viewers can feel your trachea. You can actually feel your trachea. And then the trachea divides into two. So the right main bronchus, the left main bronchus, which are the two major airways leading into the lungs, the left and the right. And then those airways, those tubes if you like, the airways is the technical term. The tubes is the lay term. So we'll use tubes or airways interchangeably. They then get smaller and smaller in lead and divide out to different branches. Almost like a tree. So our second diagram will show that the tree, the tracheal bronchial tree, starts with the trachea, then it goes to the bronchi, the main bronchi, and the bronchi divide and divide. And then they divide into bronchioles, smaller, smaller, smaller tubes. Those tubes lead to air sacs. So if we can go back to the first diagram, please. The air sacs are the terminal part of those units. They're called alveoli. So alveoli is a medical term. The air sac is really important and we'll come back to that. It really is responsible for the main function of the lung, which will answer your question. What is the main function of the lung? So we'll talk about that in a second. And as you can see, under the lungs is a diaphragm. That is a large muscle which divides the thorax, the chest cavity, from the abdominal cavity. Not only does it divide, but its main function is in respiration as well, in breathing. So we'll talk about that shortly. Now surrounding the lungs, you can go to diagram number three, please, is a thin membrane, a thin lining called the pleura. And the membrane that surrounds the lung is called the visceral pleura. And then inside the rib cage, inside the chest wall, there's another membrane which is the parietal pleura. So a very thin lining, extremely thin lining. And those linings, the two pleurae, they rub against each other. And when you're breathing and breathing out, they're rubbing against each other and there's a lubricant that's produced in that area that will allow them to slide against each other smoothly. Now there's a cavity, the pleural cavity, between the edge of the lung, the outside of the lung and the chest wall. And that cavity in normal state, in healthy states, should actually be empty. But in disease states, it's filled with fluid. It fills with blood, with infection, with pus or with air. Which affects the... It affects the rubbing of the lung, but essentially it has other effects which are more important, which is it compresses the lungs, fluid from outside, pushes onto the lungs and compresses them. And it presses on the diaphragm and causes breathlessness, et cetera. Now I'm a lung specialist, I'm a respiratory specialist, but my subspecialty is actually in diseases of the pleura. That's my main interest of all the... So we're probably not going to touch on pleural diseases much later on in the next eight episodes, actually, because they're not as common as other conditions which we'll speak about. And then the other things that are also involved in the respiratory system and the breathing are the muscles. So we mentioned the diaphragm. The diaphragm is the major muscle that's involved. And when you breathe in, the diaphragm contracts and pushes down and your tummy goes out because the diaphragm is pushing onto the abdominal contents and your tummy goes out. And when you breathe out, the diaphragm relaxes and goes back into a dome-shaped. You know, subhanAllah. I was just about to... Are you breathing as we're talking? Yeah, I was just thinking, subhanAllah, everything just go into place, so perfectly. Amazing. And then the other muscles that are involved in breathing are the intercostal muscles which are between the two ribs. There's muscles, there's external and internal intercostal muscles. They're involved in breathing as well, breathing in, breathing out. And then all of that is controlled by a respiratory center in the brain. So we have our main brain, which is the cerebrum, and then the part that connects the brain to the spinal cord is called the brainstem. The brainstem is the breathing center and that controls our breathing. It's actually our breathing, really. We're not... normally we're not thinking about it, right? We're just breathing in and out and actually our brain is controlling it. So those... that's the anatomy. The lungs, you have the lungs, you have the tubes, you have the air sacs. There's tissue around the air sacs, which we can touch on later. You have the pleura, the lining of the lungs, you have the muscles, and you have the brain. And any of that pathway can be affected and can affect the breathing system. And sometimes more than one of those pathways can be affected. And then that's the anatomy. That's the first part done. It's very fascinating. I hope the views are enjoying this. Now, as for the physiology, the physiology means function of the lungs. The main function of the lung is guest transfer. We're breathing in air from the outside. And within air, what we really are breathing in, what we really want, I should say, is oxygen. 21% of air is actually oxygen. Most of it is not oxygen. Most of it is nitrogen and other things. And we're breathing in oxygen. That oxygen goes through the airways, all that tubes that I just described, and it goes through the tubes and it goes into the air sacs. Now, if we can bring up diagram number five, I think it is, I think number five is the air sacs. The air sacs are surrounded by blood vessels. The red things that you can see are tiny, tiny capillaries, blood vessels. Within the blood vessels is blood and within that is red blood cells. Within that is the hemoglobin. And the hemoglobin has a high affinity for oxygen. So the oxygen diffuses, if you remember from your TCS, it's all coming back now. Within the air sac is a space. Air oxygen is there. The oxygen diffuses across the thin membrane that surrounds the air sacs and into the blood vessels and into the red blood cells is held by hemoglobin and the blood is pumped through to the heart. And the left side of the heart in particular, where after the blood has become oxygenated by the lungs and the left side of the heart is more powerful than the right side because the left side of the heart actually pumps blood throughout the body. So against gravity to your legs, to your limbs, to your brain, sorry, with gravity downstream and against gravity upstream to the brain. So the left side of the heart receives blood from the lungs after it has become oxygenated. Is there a part of that flow that has more of the blood oxygen received? So all of your body requires oxygen and it's all relative. Certain organs probably require a bit more etc. But all organs have cells and mitochondria and DNA etc. and they all need oxygen as part of their normal functioning process to produce energy, to produce ATP and you need the oxygen to produce energy. And it goes without saying if you limit the amount of oxygen that you breathe in or if within these functions the oxygen is kind of being affected or it's not going to the red blood parts, that's where you get kind of the conditions and the diseases and all that. Exactly, so you know other parts of the body receive less oxygen if your lungs are not working properly. So actually the lungs are very important. The other function of the lung, well it's part of the gas transfer we talked about oxygen, in fact if I can just digress for a second and just share another piece of really interesting fact these alveoli, these air sacs there's 300 million of them in your lung 300 million, that's quite amazing. And if you lay these out all these alveoli per two lungs, per person you lay them out, they're they're as big as a tennis court Masha'Allah sitting in your lung, SubhanAllah So Allah SWT has created our lungs in such a way it's so clever, it's so smart it's mind boggling, but it's all about surface area, the more surface area you have the more you enable gas transfer it's all about surface area I don't want to digress but did the imams ever refer to this? Do you know? Gosh, that's an amazing question because we always hear about the imams referring to scientific facts and they have these miracles that they talk about and 1400 years later it's everything which is being revealed Did they relate to this specific part maybe the lung, or the body So there is a book that the name escapes me at the moment Imam Ja'far Sadaq, alaihi s-salam As you know Imam Ja'far Sadaq lived in a time which he had was much more open and conducive for him to spread the sciences of Ahl-e-Bait, alaihi s-salam because it was the time when the Umayyad Khalifah was falling and the Abbas Khalifah hasn't yet started so he had a wonderful opportunity and he taught many scholars as you know he taught many of the big scholars from the Sunni school and there's I think I may be wrong, I hope people don't call me on this but Hadith Mufadwal I think is the name of the book which is out there actually can be downloaded from online and that talks about some amazing facts about the human body but a lot of the students of Imam Ja'far Sadaq later on went to become either physicians or scientists or chemists Again the name of a particular person who was a chemist escapes me so I can't remember a specific Hadith about the lungs but there are things and there are of course there are things that were the Ahl-e-Bait and the holy prophets have spoken about health from a medical point of view so that's the function the gas transfer the other thing is when all that blood is used around the body the body produces a waste gas which is carbon dioxide CO2 the CO2 travels from the rest of the body in the blood vessels into the lungs, into the air sacs and we breathe it out and this happens in every single breath that we take and breath we breathe out that's the major function of the lung the second function of the lung is protection actually if you think about it to so many things in the environment we breathe everything because you mentioned 21% of the air is oxygen that's what we need what about the rest of the the rest of the air that we breathe in is fine but it's all the added stuff the pollution, the particulate matter which is tiny tiny little things all the noxious substances smoke, dusts, whatever there's a group of lung disorders which we describe as occupational lung diseases which are caused by environmental factors organic dusts so farmers for example and these are organic dusts or inorganic dusts such as people that work in industrial environments with chemicals or fumes or dusts and they are exposed to these dusts for example asbestos is one of them we have a lot of them in the UK and the western ones not so much in the eastern world but if you in 1911 for example those firefighters that went to 1911 to rescue people and especially those that after they had collapsed they were exposed to so many dusts a lot of them have actually developed lifelong lung diseases that have actually in many cases led to respiratory failure and people have died from that because they're lung damage so that's just an example there's so many other examples other examples are in wars in the European Union and other nuclear weapons and biological weapons and people have breathed in those chemicals and that's caused damage to the lungs so the lung protects us against these things and the way it does that against this is amazing there's I think we have another diagram for the viewers diagram number six which will show the lining of the lung inside the tubes in the lining of the lungs there's hairs called cilia this is the lining of the lungs the lungs normally produced in healthy states produce mucus and that mucus traps these things that we breathe in that are not healthy to our body and then it's the cilia wafted up their hairs that beat like that they wafted up that mucus and it comes all the way up to the throat and we swallow it without knowing so rather than it remaining in the lungs and causing damage so it's not harmful to our stomach it's harmful to our lungs a lot of these things so it's amazing that's amazing we are nearly towards the end so as a lung specialist what was it that drew you towards this sort of area are you still as excited about it when you started working on it so I remember being a medical student actually one of my first placements my first medical placement as actually as a third year medical students the third year is when we start our clinical experience as medical students the first two years were mainly in universities and lecture theatres I remember doing a respiratory rotation and that's when I started becoming interested I think what drove me was the diversity of diseases the acuity versus the chronicity of the conditions there are some conditions which are very acute like infections which we'll talk about acute asthma and other things which called acute respiratory failure or respiratory specialist you can go in there potentially make a difference to someone's life and save someone's life whereas you have some people who have chronic conditions a lot of those conditions are irreversible they cause chronic respiratory failure and you just support them those patients to live with it and the other spectrum at the same end of those chronic conditions is palliative care where you're just helping people with their symptoms at the end of life lung cancers and things like that there's so much diversity in different ways so many different conditions that affect different ethnicities as well within respiratory medicine so you come across a wide variety of people of different ages patients of different ethnic groups etc and the other thing that drives me to it is the practical procedures I like to do things with my hand so there's a lot of opportunity for practical procedures within respiratory medicine where again you can make a difference to people's lives in terms of symptoms and diagnosis and management of their symptoms It's amazing so we've been told you've done quite a bit of work in Iraq for charity things for future episodes to see what you've done and hear about it I think that's all we've got time for but actually just one question you mentioned about the two lungs we have can we survive on one? We can survive on one so there's a procedure or an operation called a pneumonectema which means removing of one lung and normally that's done in lung cancer where the cancer is so large that you have to remove or not necessarily so large but pressing on such vital structures that you can't get away with removing just a part of the lung you have to remove the whole lung and people can survive some people can develop breathlessness it depends how healthy the other lung is if that lung is damaged from emphysema and smoking then they probably will be breathless but at least they will survive cancer potentially so yes you can in the same way that you can survive on one kidney normally most often you can survive on one kidney Fantastic Well I think we've got so much to discuss I've got four questions about that in terms of even keeping the lungs healthy in the future episodes we will discuss that so thank you so much for today I can't wait for the rest of the episode it's a fantastic start Ali is usually chatty so he's clearly mesmerised with the information so Brilliant Just echo the words of Zara thank you so much for your time we look forward to having you on the following shows on that note we are carrying on with the health topic or health vibe within the show today so brace yourselves it's going to be quite a challenging show so hopefully you're relaxed you've got your tea in your hand to take in and soak in a lot of the information that's going to be sent towards you after the break we're going to have it said we're going to be talking about jurisprudence however from a mental health perspective so join us after the break