The next time you move your hand, keep in mind that there are more muscles and ligaments and tendons and vessels involved than… well… I know at the moment. 😉 It’s amazing! For a structure as thin as the hand, there are so many tissues packed into it. We often take the range of motion of our hands for granted, but there are a lot of structure-function relationships at work, many of which we discovered during our dissection yesterday.
For example, just the process of typing this post requires a tremendous amount of flexion/extension and abduction/adduction of my fingers. I imagine my carpal tunnel probably looks like a chaotic scene of tendons shortening and lengthening after every keystroke. With that in mind, it’s fascinating how our bodies prevent damage with all these tendons moving in close proximity to each other. Compartmentalizing and synovial sheaths really help keep the components of the hand structured and protected.
My group also examined the vasculature of the hand (which was difficult as most of the vessels have significantly narrowed at the extremity). We also found the muscles responsible for our thumb’s incredible range of motion, movement of our finger joints, etc. It’s kind of disheartening to know that we’re now completely done with the upper limb. Our cadaver has been very cooperative despite our cluelessness at times, so hopefully that’ll carry over to our dissection of the lower limb. 🙂
