In today’s micro-lecture, Australian Paramedical College Hon. Snr. Lecturer Sam Willis talks about the body’s Ph scale.
In this micro lecture we are going to talk about the body’s Ph scale. Now, I’ll be the first to admit this is one of the more trickier of the micro lectures that we’ve had in the series, but we need to talk a little bit about the Ph scale because it really does underpin human life. Now some of you may have already seen or heard about the pH scale, others may have not, and that’s fine. But for this micro lecture, we are just going to talk about the pH scale and nothing else. And now of course, this does relate to conditions such as acidosis and alkalosis, which are both life threatening conditions. But let’s start by talking just about the pH scale.
Now, everything that we eat, every time we take something into my mouth and break it down and it goes into our body and it becomes made smaller and smaller and ends up … The nutrients end up in the cells and get floating around in the blood. Every time we take a deep breath in and deep breath out and we just live our lives. Every time we go to the toilet and excrete, all of these things that are altering the pH of our blood. So what do we mean by pH?
It’s a measurement of the amount of hydrogen in our blood. Now if you’ve never seen or heard this before and I’m basically speaking another language, welcome to the world of medicine. So this is basically a measure of hydrogen ions. So just think about hydrogen. Now blood has a pH value of 7.35 to 7.45. So if we were to take a look at the scale in front of us, you can see how zero is on the left and there’s a reason it’s read. 14 is on the right.
Now anything that is zero is extremely acidic. Anything that is 14 is extremely alkaline, and you don’t want to be in any of these areas. And if I can be completely honest, anything below 7.35, your body does not like that one bit and you are at risk of catastrophic failures and death very quickly. Likewise, anything above 7.45 and your body does not like that either. That’s moving into worlds alkalosis. So anything below 7.35 is classed as an acidosis. Anything above 7.35 is an alkalosis. Let’s take a look at another image here. Now what you can see here is a tip of dust, the scale, the scale that we’ve just used and twisted around so that it’s now vertical. Here we have the seven which is neutral.
Anything in the middle is neutral. This gives you an idea of other things in your world that are acidic and alkaline. So as you can see, fish will die around about here. Fishery reproduction affected around about five or four. Think about the actual on a human being. Stomach acid is around 3.5 and lower. So that gives you an idea. Milk of magnesium and blah, blah, blah. And so, so it gives you an idea of the type of things in our world and how everything that we do and everything that we are is based around this pH scale. What I would suggest is that you now get your heads into the books and go away and do some reading, but be warned. It’s highly scientific and you’re going to need to watch lots and lots of Youtube clips, but eventually, it will all come together nicely.
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