Professor Robin Condliffe

speaker

497 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 7 Jul

Professor Robin Condliffe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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What's Up Docs? · Doctors' Notes: Lungs Special at Crossed Wires Festival · 7 Jul 2026 podcast

So you've touched on already the aim of taking a breath is to get air, which, as we've said, contains oxygen into the lungs.

and to get rid of carbon dioxide, which the body has made.

So the lungs are like bellows, and you've got to open the bellows to suck in air.

We have a muscle.

The main muscle we use is not the muscles in the chest.

It's the muscle below the diaphragm.

So the diaphragm goes down, and...

air is sucked in.

Now that air we've talked about, that air might be quite mucky.

So the lungs, the body has some ways of trying to clean it.

You've got hairs in your nose.

You've got mucus all the way down.

It's what we call in the profession snot.

And that traps

so particles and actually have tiny little little hairs all the way down your windpipe the trachea and the from the trachea down the bronchi and these little cilia just waft and they move this mucus all the way to the back of your throat and then you can either blow it out or you swallow it and it goes in the stomach

So air is brought down, it's cleansed down the windpipe, the trachea, bronchi, they divide until we get to these half a billion alveoli.

And that's where the magic happens, because those alveoli are really, really, really thin.

And they're next to tiny little blood vessels called capillaries.

So blood from the right side of the heart, which is low in oxygen, pumps blood through the pulmonary artery.

And then it goes very, very slowly through the capillaries.

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