The Anatomy and The Function of the Nasolacrimal apparatus

 The Anatomy and The Function of the         Nasolacrimal apparatus

The nasolacrimal apparatus and that's a fancy way of saying we're gonna talk about tiers we're gonna talk about what they're for how they're produced and how they're drained now every human being on the face of the earth at some point has cried we all do it we all have done it even the Prince of all Saiyans has cried at some point in his life the only human being that hasn't cried is of course Chuck Norris he's the only man alive that can make onions cry but assuming that you're not Chuck Norris assuming that you're any other regular human being I don't care how tough of a guy you are you've cried and there's a lot of stimulus for to your production sadness joy overwhelming and motion irritation of the eye and of course onions so first of all what is the purpose of the tears the purpose of tears is to coat the surface of the eyeball and protect it so if for whatever reason you didn't have tears on the surface of your eyeball then your cornea is going to be more susceptible to physical damage and we can't have physical damage of the cornea so you keep the tears on there to lubricate it which help protect it from physical damage but there's another purpose of the tears and it has to do with bacteria so bacteria if you don't kill them and don't control the growth of bacteria you can end up with overgrowth so suppose you had a situation where you didn't have any tears on your eyeball you'd be first of all really itchy that's for sure but you'd have a lot of bacterial growth on your eye and they might even penetrate deeper into the eye socket the reason tears prevent this from happening is because tears contain antimicrobial substances for example they contain a substance called lysozyme this is an enzyme that's present in a lot of léa secretions but in any case what it does is it breaks down bacterial cell walls specifically the peptidoglycan in the bacterial cell walls and then it renders them more susceptible to our immune defenses our innate immune defenses I should say one of the other major antimicrobial properties of tears  is that they are salty I think we all know that that if you've ever tasted your own tears what you think everybody's done at some point they're salty and that salt content actually helps inhibit the growth of a lot of species of bacteria so the major thing about the tears other than providing physical protection is they also provide antimicrobial protection to the eyeball okay now how our tears produced how did they get across the eye and then how do we get rid of them because in any biological system if we've got a way to make something we also have to wait have a way to get rid of it so to produce the tears we have this thing that sits on the lateral superior surface of the eyeball a little bit back it's called the lacrimal gland and of course we can't see this from the surface it's deep a little bit but it is above the eye and on the lateral side so if we didn't have a face here to help us we would know this as a right eyeball because the lacrimal gland has to be on the lateral side of the eye okay and so if it's on the lateral side of the eye this would make this the right eyeball in any case the lacrimal gland is going to make the tears it's going to secrete them onto the surface of the eye by moving them through these excretory lacrimal Dunn's okay and there's going to be several of those that allow the tears to move through the lacrimal gland and onto the surface of the eye Hey and of course these tears are going to help lubricate the eye they're gonna help protect it and so on and so forth and then eventually those tears are gonna make their way over here to something called the lacrimal lake and associated with the lacrimal lake.