Talk:Palmaris longus

Fascinating. ^postate 22:58, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

I'd be tempted to suggest this for the mainspace, in fact. ^moral 22:59, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

It's way better than some of our (sh)articles. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 23:06, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. It became a pet topic of mine while at medical school, when my anatomy cadaver was missing it in the left arm. There are plenty of these "variable muscles" but this is the only one that can be easily verified. As far as moving it to mainspace, I'll leave that up to others to decide. VOX^HUMANA 00:24, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Mainspace for sure. Very interesting article about something I had never heard of. --Damo^Hi 01:44, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Main. ArchieGoodwin (talk) 01:46, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

How to end it

I'm stuck on how to end this, so I'm open to suggestions. VOX^HUMANA 00:29, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Tradition states "==Footnotes== <references/>" ^bomination 01:21, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. VOX^HUMANA 01:38, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Corrections

Just a note, the Palmaris Longus doesn't actually do NOTHING, it's a weak extensor of the wrist and there is growing consensus that its proximal attachment also acts as an axis for stabilizing supination. Given the huge variation between individual humans (your grandmother's arm is very, very different from that of a professional football player), and the difficulty of measuring complex motions in 3d space accurately, it's only recently that a lot of biomechanical problems have become answerable. You'll get no argument from me that the Palmaris Longus is neither crucial, nor even necessary for normal function, but that's still distinct from useless. My car hood has a little groove un the underside that is probable there to help guide the rod the holds the hood up into it's little hole, never really needed it, but I can still see how it might be helpful on rare occasion. The Palmaris Longus is somewhat like that, people that have it probably get a percent or fractional percent more stability in a particular motion or a unnoticed increase in wrist flexion strength, but not enough to confer enough evolutionary advantage to drive the percentage any closer to 100% and completely outweigh the cost of having to grow and maintain an extra muscle and tendon. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18516329. PS: As an orthopedic biomechanics researcher I can speak firsthand on the difficulty of getting good strength and stability data on even muscles and tendons that have obvious and undisputed biological utility. The motions caused by movements of the tendons that control the fingers weren't quantitatively mapped until 2009. To get our data we have to use multiple magnetic interferometers or digital fluoroscopy (like X-ray video), stuff that either wasn't around or cheaply available 15 years ago, so its highly possible that we just didn't have the resources to figure the Palmaris Longus out until now.