This resource was first created by Jim McGarrick many years ago, and then more recently updated with some new sections by Dr. Margaret Gladden. Those versions were intended as a support for lectures on proprioception in which students were told about muscle spindles.
Now, however, the science content of lecture courses has been greatly reduced, so Marian Huett and I have made a few additional changes. In essence, we have assumed students will have virtually no relevant background knowledge, and so simplified some text, and removed some details while trying to preserve the relevance to more clinical aspects.
Our intention is that a student who has only limited time and interest should be able to look at only the first and last sets of tabs (i.e. Muscle Spindle Basics, and Functional aspects of Muscle Spindles), and still come away with some useful knowledge & understanding. Anyone who is interested in finding out how spindles work (e.g. a year 3 BSc student) can look through the intermediate sections, and those should provide enough explanation for him to then be able to read and understand the primary literature.
The current version is still lacking a small number of questions in the ‘quiz’ section. We will try to provide those over the next few weeks.
Please could you let us know if you spot any errors, or missed opportunities (important things which should be said, related topics that it might be useful to mention). If your suggestion is just a sentence or two, we will add it to the existing tab(s), but if it’s more substantial (a new topic) a new tab could be created.
Also, if you know of anyone not on the initial circulation list for the URL, who might be interested in this, please forward it.
Once we have your comments back we will make any corrections and then the final version will go live on the VC for students.
Anthea Rowlerson: anthea.rowlerson@kcl.ac.uk
Marian Huett: marian.huett@kcl.ac.uk