BACKGROUND Barber's disease is an acquired occupational disease produced by short customers' hairs that penetrate the interdigital spaces of the hands. The lesion has been reported to occur mostly on the hands of male hairdressers. The purpose of this article is to report a rare case of a female hairdresser who developed a pilonidal sinus in the interdigital web of her non-dominant hand and rev...

What determines the laterality of activation in motor cortex for words whose meaning is related to bodily actions? It has been suggested that the neuronal representation of the meaning of action-words is shaped by individual experience. However, core language functions are left-lateralized in the majority of both right- and left-handers. It is still an open question to what degree connections b...

Numerous studies suggest that interhemispheric inhibition-relayed via the corpus callosum-plays an important role in unilateral hand motions. Interestingly, transcallosal inhibition appears to be indicative of a strong laterality effect, where generally the dominant hemisphere exerts inhibition on the nondominant one. These effects have been largely identified through functional studies in adul...

To determine whether other digits move when normal humans attempt to move just one digit, we asked 10 right-handed subjects to move one finger at a time while we recorded the motion of all five digits simultaneously with both a video motion analysis system and an instrumented glove. We quantified the independence of the digits to compare (1) the different digits, (2) the right versus the left h...

In the self-touch illusion (STI), some can feel that both hands are touching each other even when they are separated actually. This is achieved by giving synchronized touches to both hands. Because the STI involves both hands (an administrating hand and a receptive hand) of a single person, two types of proprioceptive drifts (PDs) simultaneously occur in such a way that both hands are attracted...

Intermanual transfer refers to the phenomenon whereby unilateral motor training induces performance gains in both the trained limb and in the opposite, untrained limb. Evidence indicates that intermanual transfer is attenuated in older adults following training on a simple ballistic movement task, but not after training on a complex task. This study investigated whether differences in plasticit...

The aim of the present study was an in-depth analysis of fine motor skills of the hands in elderly women from different socio-cultural backgrounds. The research also included analysis of the associations of age with the variables assessing right- and left-hand motor skills and its effect on hand performance asymmetry. The study examined 486 women over the age of 60. The study measured dominant ...

OBJECTIVES To compare the contamination level of physicians' hands and stethoscopes and to explore the risk of cross-transmission of microorganisms through the use of stethoscopes. PATIENTS AND METHODS We conducted a structured prospective study between January 1, 2009, and May 31, 2009, involving 83 inpatients at a Swiss university teaching hospital. After a standardized physical examination...