hello anatomy colleagues this is dr alsup and welcome to station 14 and our beginning of the
exploration of the lower limb so we're going to start as we always have with the bones then
we'll talk joints and then we will finish with the muscles so starting with the most proximal
associated with the lower limb would be these coxal bones which are part of the pelvic girdle
now we talked about these already in a previous laboratory but i just wanted to make sure that you
remembered that this is going to be an important part of the formation of the hip joint but we
since we've already talked about the coxal bones are going to focus on the femur and the patella
so the femur is going to be the only bone associated with the thigh until you get to the
very distal end and then you are getting into the knee joint region and you can see how the patella
is going to be located anterior to the femur or the anterior portion of the femur so there's that
close relationship between these two bones so the femur now we are looking at a posterior view and i
don't have an anterior view here but the reasoning behind that is because pretty much everything i
want you to see you need to look at this posterior view so this is going to be the proximal portion
of the femur and this will be the distal portion so this would be the hip joint
portion and this would be the knee joint portion and this is going to be medial
and this will be lateral and the reason i know that is because the head of the femur
is always going to be directed medially because it's articulating with the acetabulum and that
coxal bone will always be more medial so that really helps me if i see where the head is i
know that has to be medial and that can help me down here with the epicondyles and the condyles
um so as you move distal you have this pinched in area right here which is going to be the neck
of the femur it as you can see is considerably thinner than what you have in the trochanteric
region as well as the head this is a common area for fracture so that misnomer of a fractured hip
is often a fracture of the neck of the femur and you can see that it is a little bit thinner in
terms of the bone so not it makes intuitive sense as to why this would be more frequently fractured
opposite to the head so very laterally facing will be the greater trochanter
as its name would suggest it is going to be larger than the lesser trochanter
the greater trochanter again as i mentioned is going to be lateral
it is going to be a muscle attachment site for a lot of muscles to make it so large so you're
gonna have the gluteus medius and minimus as well as some of the more deeply placed
lateral rotators of the hip so not the gluteus maximus but some of the deeper lateral rotators
and this lesser trochanter is smaller it is going to be posteriorly oriented because we're looking
at that posterior view so that makes sense and this is going to be the distal attachment site
for the iliopsoas moving down to the body or the shaft of the posterior femur you will see
this line that's kind of running down and this is referred to as the linea aspera and this will
be the distal attachment site for the adductors or that medial compartment
many of those muscles in that medial compartment of the thigh so depending
on how robust those are the line could be larger or smaller depending on the individual
and then moving down to the distal end of the femur you'll have the epicondyles
and the condyles and i find these kind of difficult to tell apart so that's really
where understanding this proximal portion of the bone will help so if you know the head is medial
this makes sense that this would be the medial condyle and this would be the medial epicondyle
that greater trochanter is always lateral so this would be the lateral condyle and this
would be the lateral epicondyle so those lateral epicondyles and medial epicondyle will be an
attachment point for the collateral ligaments and then of course the actual condyles are what are
going to articulate with those extremely shallow tibial condyles in order to form the knee joint
again just quickly looking at the patelli or patella if you're when you're only talking about
one as we saw here they're going to be located on the patellar surface
or the anterior distal surface of the femur and recall these are sesamoid bones so sesamoid bones
are forming within tendons so the patella is going to form within the quadriceps tendon
so that muscle is going to be kind of located right here and then its tendon will extend
down to this region as the patellar ligament and the patella will form within that tendon
and so you can see this is going to be an anterior view of the patella and this is a posterior view
and the reason i know this is that this posterior view is nice and smooth because
it's directly articulating with the femur so there'll be articular cartilage there whereas
it's a little bit rougher here on this anterior side because it is not an articular surface
okay so that is the femur and the patella we will meet you at the next station
in order to talk about the bones of the leg thanks for your time