I wonder about “from the bloodstream into the nephron” not just being a dead giveaway that it’s secretion, though. Given that there are only two options, secretion or reabsorption, it sort of gives up the ghost a bit, no?
yeah it does a lot. Im just not really sure what to do on this card for the wording. It seems like it has to be vague in order to test directionality but by making it vague and only saying secretion it feels like it does more harm than good. On the sentence structure alone when I see that something is the site of secretion I assume it’s the site where things are secreted from it not into it. The problem is we cant say it’s the site of absorbing these things either because absorption is used to refer to where substances exit back into the bloodstream from the nephron in the other cards.
More harm than good? I’m not sure I follow, or agree with, that logic necessarily.
Right, it’s not absorbing these things. It’s secreting them. Like, that is the proper term for what is occurring at that point in the nephron, no?
It’s maybe not the most artful phrasing, but unless I’m missing something the sentence structure is unambiguously correct
In any case, the current suggestion is too much of a giveaway, imo
It is definitely true though that in renal physio, secretion refers to movement from the blood into the nephron and the PCT secretes H+, urea, NH₃, and K+ into the filtrate. I just wonder if the sentence is kind of vague without a frame of reference since a lot of people just view absorption as taking something in and secretion as moving something out. Therefore when people see its the site of secretion that may suggest to them that these things are being secreted from the PCT into the bloodstream rather than the PCT itself secreting things into the filtrate within the nephron. Similarly, without specifying directionality, you could argue the PCT “absorbs” urea etc. into itself. For clarity, in my opinion, it might be better to state whether it’s being secreted into the nephron lumen (from blood) or reabsorbed into the blood for these cards. I agree though the current suggestion is a big giveaway.
Maybe the fix is just as easy as: The {{c1::proximal convoluted tubule::part of nephron}} is the site of {{c2::secretion into the nephron lumen}} for {{c3::H +, U rea, N H3, and K +}}
LMK what you think.
For sure I think this is a common-enough point of confusion, though some of that hews to the terms just being less-than-intuitive. But, this has been an issue, and will be an issue, for a long time to come. Lots of terminology can be accused of being less than intuitively clear.
Someone, too many generations ago to count, decided that the reference frame here is from the point of the interstitium/bloodstream. That’s just as random as any other vantage point, but it is what it is and it’s consistent across textbooks and renal physiology.
I think we get into murky territory once we start playing with suggestions based on what people ‘may’ do. I will point out that we don’t have any evidence that this card has been a source of consternation at this point. That’s not to say that it can’t be improved upon, but we can’t form bases on conjecture.
One could argue many things, but secretion and reabsorption are also the correct and canonical textbook terms here. You ‘could’ argue for a thousand things in science terminology, but that’s not our purview. Those are the terms as they stand for the processes that they describe.
Again, though, secretion is that. That is what secretion is. I can see a point of clarification in the Extra field something to the effect of:
- Secretion is the term used to describe the process by which solutes move from X to Y.
- Reabsorption is the term used to describe the process by which solutes move from D to C.
But, imo I don’t know if, at least as it currently stands, I see the wisdom in adding redundancy to the sentence structure of the card itself. At least in part bc I don’t know if the Text field is always necessarily the best arena for clarifying sources of potential confusion (that, again, we don’t have any direct evidence for here as existing or as being an issue).
If you want to workshop it I’m open to further ideas and/or looking at it more. I won’t decry if we can make the world a slightly kinder place for all those poor souls who have to memorize kidney shit (a future urologist, I am not).
The extra section already takes a somewhat similar approach to what I was suggesting for the extra section.
" A number of waste products are secreted from the blood into the PCT for excretion (H +, U rea, N H3, and K +, etc. DUMP the HUNK)."
If we dont want to change the text wording I think the extra section is already clear enough and we are good then! Maybe in one of the reabsorption cards we can add the reabsorption clarification though if needed.