Fingers Guide To Health

Could fingers actually determine how healthy you are? Could they? I wonder.....

Palm readers may not be the only ones who can tell a lot about people by examining their hands. However, scientist nowadays actually believe that relative lengths of index and ring fingers provide clues about a variety of characteristics, including musical ability, athletic prowess and, in a study just released, osteoarthritis risk.


Scientist found out that the differences between two fingers' length signifies the amount of testosterone exposure in the womb. The longer the ring finger compared to the index finger, the higher the exposure. And typically, a woman's hands would have an index finger and ring finger that are similar in length, while a man's hands tend to have a longer ring finger than index finger. However, don' t worry girls if your ring finger is longer than your index finger, doesn't mean that you are going to grow hair all over :p. Well, at least that's not my case!

In 1998, British psychologist John Manning first linked the index-ring finger ratio to prenatal hormone levels. He noticed that in young boys, but not young girls, ring fingers tended to be longer than index fingers. He speculated that prenatal hormone exposure played a role.

He suggested that sex difference almost certainly arises before birth and that it can be seen in fetuses at nine weeks' gestation and doesnt change at puberty. He also added that male symphony orchestra musicians have lower finger ratios than less-musical men, that heterosexual men have lower ratios than homosexual men and that people with lower ratios tend to do better on certain tests of spatial ability. He theorizes that prenatal testosterone benefits the cardiovascular system.

However, on the other hand, British rheumatologist Michael Doherty and his collaborators at the University of Nottingham did just that in a study in the January issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism. They found out that osteoarthritis is more common in men and that increased activity and physically demanding sports could contribute to the condition through repetitive joint trauma. So it makes sense that a lower finger ratio, thought to be more common in men and in athletic individuals, would be linked to a higher osteoarthritis risk.

By comparing about 2,000 osteoarthritis patients with about 1,000 people without osteoarthritis, the scientists found that is indeed the case. The strongest link, osteoarthritis of the knee in women whose ring fingers were longer than their index fingers.

Interesting..........Hmmm....But now I have a question!! How about those people with abnormally longer middle finger compared to the rest of the fingers? Does it mean that they are going to end up like GW Bushy?? O_o