Med-Surg Immune System, Part 1: Intro, Innate Immunity, Inflammation

Hey, I'm Cathy. And in this video playlist, I will be covering the immune system. If you are following along with cards, I'm in the immune system section of our Medical-Surgical Nursing Edition 2.0 deck. And I will be following along with that deck.

However, you don't need to have this deck to get value out of this video series. And I just encourage you, if you don't have our deck, to make flashcards of your own because a lot of the information that you need to know as a nurse, it takes repetition to really get that information down.

So some of the items that I'll be covering in this playlist include the difference between innate and acquired immunity.

We'll be covering immune system malfunction.

We'll be talking about different disorders that relate to the immune system, including lupus, scleroderma, and HIV.

And then we will spend the remaining time talking about cancer. We'll talk about the risk factors, the signs and symptoms, the diagnostics for cancer, and treatment. And we'll definitely be covering nursing care of patients who have to undergo chemotherapy, radiation, etc.

In terms of the types of cancers that we will cover, we'll touch on a number of different cancers, but we will focus more on the most common types of cancers. So this includes skin, lung, prostate, breast and colorectal cancer.

So the overall function of the immune system is to protect the body from disease-causing microorganisms, and we do this through innate and acquired immunity.

Innate immunity is something that everybody is born with. These are defense mechanisms that help protect the body by acting immediately against all antigens. Okay? So not a specific antigen but against all antigens.

So some things that fall within innate immunity include our inflammatory response, which I'll talk about more here in just a minute. Our skin. So our skin is a barrier to prevent harmful microorganisms from entering our body. Our stomach acid. So if we were to swallow some bacteria, our stomach acid would hopefully burn that up and cook that so it can't hurt us. In addition, we have mucus which helps to trap pathogens so that we can't get infected, and phagocytic cells within the body. These are all things that all people have and work immediately against all antigens.

Then we have our acquired immunity. This is where we produce antibodies against specific antigens and we develop acquired immunity through the action of B and T cells. And we'll definitely go into more detail about those cells and the action of those cells in my next video.

But before we get into the details of acquired immunity, let's touch a little bit more on the inflammatory response, which is a key part of your innate immunity. So inflammation is your body's protective reaction to injury, disease, or damage to tissues in your body, and there are three stages to inflammation.

The first stage we would expect warmth; erythema, which is redness; edema, which is swelling; decreased function and/or pain at the site of injury.

During the second stage, white blood cells would kill off the microorganisms and exudate containing those white blood cells, as well as dead tissue cells would accumulate at the site of the injury.

And then during the third stage, the damaged tissue will be replaced by scar tissue.

Okay. So that is inflammation. When I come back with my next video, we will go into the details of acquired immunity. Thanks so much for watching!