After being motivated by @Hanzell, I decided to share some ‘interesting’ medical facts to you. ‘Interesting’ is in quotation because I guess the feeling is quite subjective – it may bore some people.
Anyway, let’s get to it then.
1. The shoulder joint is the most dislocated joint in the body. This is because the bulb-shaped head of your humerus (the bone in your arm) is four times bigger than the cleft of your shoulder blade where it is attached in a ball-and-socket joint. Any sudden fall in an awkward position can quite easily shift the bone out of articulation. So in essence, your shoulder joint is quite imperfect – that’s the price it has to pay for almost 360 degrees of rotation.
2. The George of the Jungle and Tarzan stuff you see on TV is actually quite impossible, if not dangerous in real life. If you’re falling down a tree (which is insane, because… why the hell did you climb a tree?), it’s not the best idea to try to grab one of the branches so as to avoid hitting the ground. Why? The Brachial Plexus is a network of nerves that supplies your arms. If you grab on to the tree that violently, the momentum your still-falling body contains could pull the roots of your Plexus out of your vertebral column; that is called avulsion. Thus, that arm might be paralyzed for life if surgical action isn't carried out.
3. Another way to completely damage your plexus (although such injuries are incredibly rare) is in a motorbike injury. If you land on your shoulder while your neck and head are turned the other way (i.e. landing on your right shoulder with your right cheek on the ground), the roots might be pulled out as well. The hands will be immobile and will lose all feeling in them.
4. If you’ve ever gotten back from a stressful day of house shopping and slept on your chair with one arm draped over the chair backrest, you might have woken up and felt unable to move that arm, while feeling like static electricity is passing through it or a hundred ants are crawling under your skin. Guess what? If you keep on doing that, you might fall victim to Saturday Night Palsy – it is actually caused by prolonged entrapment of the Radial nerve, and can also happen with poorly fashioned crutches.
What happened? Your radial nerve, one of the branches of the Brachial Plexus, was compressed somewhere in your armpit. So during the time of paralysis or that biting feeling, your radial nerve was either unable to carry signals, or the signals were sending erratically. Like what happens when your phone’s charging cord is bent. With physiotherapy and other treatment, it can be taken care of completely.
5. Ever seen a guy with a Policeman’s Tip hand? This hand is called the Policeman’s Tip, Waiter’s Tip, or Porter’s tip – choose what makes you laugh the best. It is actually Erb’s paralysis, caused by damage to C5 and C6 roots of your Brachial Plexus at a point called Erb’s point.
It’d be nice if you put some money in the hand though, that person is probably enduring a lot of body-shaming for that. Erb’s Paralysis is sometimes caused when a midwife delivering a baby pulls the head too forcefully at an awkward angle. I really don’t know what I’d do if a midwife or a doctor disfigured my child during birth though. What about you?
6. You should probably check how your kids’ teachers and caretakers treat them, especially if they’re 1-6 years of age. If the caretaker pulls, drags, or carries them by the forearm, it may result in subluxation, or partial dislocation of the elbow. It’s called Nursemaid’s Elbow (which makes no sense since it is the KID who got injured), and it goes away pretty easily though – sometimes without a Doctor’s assistance.
7. If you’re Catholic, you’ve probably seen pictures of Saint Peter or Jesus with their hands like this.
Well, it’s rightly called the Hand of Benediction. But some scientists speculate (please don’t scream blasphemy) that Peter might have actually injured his median nerve. And then because people saw Peter having his hands like that, they’d assume that’s what Jesus did, and start painting Jesus with that hand. Well then, an injury to the median nerve above the wrist makes it impossible for the victim to extend his ring and pinky fingers, while the middle finger is partially affected. Another name for this is Pointing Finger.
I hope you guys enjoyed this as much as I did. Yeah, I like knowing how tiny injuries in our bodies affect how we look or function. Next time we may treat something less... painful? Till then!
😂😂😂 it's as if you were teaching how to injure people. It's cool though but omg such little actions can be done to invoke an injury. I read somewhere before that the saturday night palsy is a trick to stop pulse? In some thriller book i saw