Part 5: Reading Multiple Choice II

Here is a very interesting article about hand injuries.

• Read the article once for general information.
• Read the questions and choose the correct answer.
• Try to find the proof in the text that your answer is correct.
• Načítám cvičení

Read the text and then go through questions 1 – 6 below and choose the correct answer, A, B, C or D which you thinks fits best according to the text.

Healing hard-working hands

(An abridged version of the article Healing hard-working hands, used with the permission of the author María Cristina Jimenez, occupational therapist specialising in hand therapy, www.mariacristinarolfer.com)

Recently, I saw a patient who was a 34-year-old janitor at a mall. He had first started experiencing sharp thumb pain a few months earlier. When I asked what his hands did most of the day, I supposed he’d talk about heavy lifting at work, but instead, he mentioned he’d been taking care of his newborn baby. “It sounds like you have mother’s thumb,” I said, to his surprise.

“Mother’s thumb” is known as such, because it is an injury commonly seen in mothers of babies, who experience pain from picking up their growing babies throughout the day by grabbing them with outstretched thumbs. I told my patient that even though the condition is called “mother’s thumb” fathers can get it, and grandparents too.

From gamekeeping to gaming

“Gamekeeper’s thumb” was an occupational injury associated with Scottish gamekeepers, who would grab a rabbit’s neck between their thumb and forefinger to break it against the ground. Over time the gamekeepers injured a ligament on the side of their thumb, resulting in pain, and weakness of their thumb. Nowadays the term is used interchangeably with “skier’s thumb”, due to the common injury among downhill skiers, who fall with their outstretched thumb holding a ski pole. Regardless of how the injury was obtained, if it is not treated promptly, the condition leads to difficulty in pinching and grasping objects.

Injuries like mother’s thumb and gamekeeper’s thumb are renamed over time as they become associated with new causes, but sometimes our changing occupations lead to injuries with interesting names vanishing completely. Hutchinson’s fracture was initially named after British surgeon Jonathan Hutchinson, who first identified it, but it was better known as “chauffeur’s fracture”.

When automobiles were first invented in the late 1800s, a new occupation emerged too: the chauffeur was the driver responsible for starting the engine (the word chauffeur is from the French verb “to heat”). Along with the new technology and a new career came a new injury. Chauffeur’s fracture was a painful wrist fracture that happened when manually starting engines, which would then backfire. As the car backfired, the crank smashed into the driver’s wrist, causing trauma.
Once automobiles became automatic, chauffeur’s fracture as a condition disappeared.

Harm to our hands today

Recently, as many people have been away from their employment due to lockdown, domestic hand accidents have been on the rise. A French epidemiological study compared emergency visits related to hand-trauma cases between 2019 and 2020 and found an increase in upper-limb and hand injuries during periods of lockdown in 2020. Dr Sanjeev Kakar, an orthopaedic surgeon from the Mayo Clinic, observed an increase in domestic hand injuries as people took on DIY projects, and spent more time in the garden and kitchen.

My colleagues now see more injuries acquired gradually, such as carpal tunnel syndrome and “tennis elbow”. These stem from home-working setups with poor ergonomics. We are overusing our keyboards with poor placement of our arms and hands during our work day.

From lockdowns to avocado-based-accidents (an accident when a person cuts their hand while trying to slice up an avocado), distinct characteristics of our time make their mark on our hands. They tell a story about our lives, which means they also tell us about history, gender and class. Hands are how we interact with the world, shaping the connective tissue of our history.

(An abridged version of the article Healing hard-working hands, used with the permission of the author María Cristina Jimenez, occupational therapist specialising in hand therapy, www.mariacristinarolfer.com)