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Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion :-))
Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion )
As the players of string instruments among us know, we develop callouses on the tips of our fingers through playing regularly. A good thing too as I remember how damned sore it was when I first started to play guitar.
I was wondering if any members indulge in any activities e.g washing dishes (I treated myself to a dishwasher a few years ago to avoid this problem) or swimming which would tend to soften the callouses on their fingers. Can anything be done to prevent or remedy this? Once, I tried applying a special spirit but ran out of patience. These days, I have much more time to practise and this compensates for my visits to the swimming pool, although I still have to allow a couple of hours after a swim before playing in a session etc.
The upside of taking such exercise is that my arms and fingers are much more supple and flexible and I am less lethargic when it comes to playing an instrument. You might suggest that I should visit the gym instead but , at the moment, I swim about 3 or 4 times a week without adverse effects so I've probably got the balance about right.
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion )
Put superglue on the tips of your fingers.
Also good for mending cuts on your fingers when band-aids get in the way of playing, broken fingernails, etc. I use it all the time. Just take care not to bond your fingers together, haha.
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion )
I'm with Cara on the superglue, and I'd add that you should find the stuff that comes in liquid form, with a brush for application. Home Depot and places like that all have it.
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion )
Cara, are you EVER going to put up the dots for Mr. Fog Goes to Baltimore? Pleeeeease? I still tell that story and still get huge belly laughs off it...
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion )
Bloody hell! Be carefull with that stuff! Acrylic adhesives are classed as skin irritants. And the fumes are harmfull. I would strongly suggest never to apply any acrylic adhesive willfully onto your skin. Never. And if you do get some spillage, clean it off as quickly as you can.
I'm just so staggered that people here could recommend that. Like saying to a flute player - smoke 60 a day - good for your lungs - look at all the crap it helps you to cough up. They must be cleaning your lungs out.
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion )
Don't worry, Danny. I'd be a bit dubious about trying such a thing and, as I said, I practise quite a lot so I don't have any real problems with my finger tips getting too soft. I was just wondering if this caused a problem for other members.
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion )
So, I once worked as a secretary in a hydrogeology firm. Our guys would go out to the nearest polluted site and help clean it up, identify and target various problems, etc. So, one of the guys in our NY office got married while I worked there, and he and his new wife moved out two days after their wedding day. He busied himself saving the world from us and our industrial and military waste immediately, and she started moving them into their new home. The kitchen cabinets needed painting, so she spent a day painting them. When Doug came home to his new house and wife, she was up to her elbows in toluene, cleaning off her brushes and "getting the paint off her hands". "Holy hell!" he yelled, "what the *bleep* are you DOING?!?" All he could think of, he told me the next day, was that here he was out heroically and idealistically saving the world from toxic waste every day and he goes home to his wife, who is systematically poisoning herself to make their home pretty.
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion )
Well I know of a guitarist who got a nasty slice on the tip of a lefthand finger right before an imporant gig. So he got out the Superglue and went to work, only to glue his middle and ring fingers together!
John J, soaking in the pool does prune up my fingers horribly, but I'd rather not talk about what it does to my other memb...
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion )
Great Story Will - that really just made me burst out laughing! hilarous! What happenend in the end? Did he still go on and play? Anybody got anymore superglue stories??
A glue with essentially the same properties as superglue (although stronger, more fexible and less toxic) is in fact sometimes used in emergency medicine as an alternative to sutures; it's important to glue only the *outermost* layer of skin, and *to avoid* layering the glue in between the cut surfaces of the wound so as to capture it within the healing tissue. It's also advisable to avoid glueing together physician and patient! A collegue (himself a clinician) had a nasty cut successfully closed this way by medics after injuring himself skiing, and I had a foot laceration similarly treated in A and E. There's a legend that superglue (or its precursor) was developed as a quick way of patching up wounded soldiers in the Vietnam war (or Korean, that's how shakey I am on that particular legend!) ....
A websearch threw up the following research, just for starters: (apologies for the length!)
http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/052197/medical.htm
A medical version of Super Glue is proving superior to stitches in closing many types of wounds. Gluing wounds shut was faster, less painful and resulted in healed skin that looked just as good, a study of 130 emergency patients found. Also, gluing seems to avert some of the infections that occur in stitched wounds. The glue eliminates the need for stitch removal, because it sloughs off along with the outer layer of skin after a couple of weeks.
Super Glue's ability to bond skin is well known. The household glue contains a warning that it can instantly stick fingers together, and youngsters occasionally do just that or seal their eyelids shut. The study of the medical uses of such glue was led by Dr. James Quinn of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and was published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.
''This relatively painless and fast method of wound repair can replace the need for suturing several million lacerations a year,'' the researchers said. The study received financial support from the manufacturer of the glue, Closure Medical Corp. of Raleigh, N.C.
Glues of the type used belong to a group of adhesives called cyanoacrylates, first described in 1949. The glue in the study, octylcyanoacrylate, is new and still experimental but is expected to be approved for U.S. marketing as early as this summer, according to the University of Michigan. Similar glues called butylcyanoacrylates have been use to repair wounds for years in other countries, including Canada, where the study was conducted at Ottawa General Hospital in Ontario.
Such glues also have been successful in grafting skin, bone and cartilage; repairing eyes; closing dangerously ballooned blood vessels in the abdomen; and stopping spinal-fluid leaks. The new glue is better than the ones used abroad because it is stronger and more flexible, the researchers said. But it cannot be used on the hands, feet or moist skin areas such as the lips because it will wear off before the wounds heal. Also, it is weaker than stitches.
Doctors in the study repaired wounds by applying the glue to skin on both sides and pressing the skin together for 30 seconds.
Three of the 65 patients whose wounds were glued shut had to be glued again when the wounds broke open; only one of the 67 stitched patients had to be stitched again. (Some patients had multiple wounds and were both glued and stitched.) Wound reopenings all were successfully repaired. The only other complication was an infection in a stitched patient. An expert not associated with the research or the manufacturer predicted wide acceptance of medical super glues. ''It is not too far-fetched to speculate that these products might eventually become available for home use,'' said Dr. Alexander T. Trott of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/9697/Jun11_97/artcl07.htm
Remember all those warnings about "crazy-gluing" your fingers together? If a Medical Center physician has his way, emergency rooms all over the United States will be using something similar in place of stitches.
James Quinn, clinical assistant professor, has completed an extensive study of a skin adhesive that takes the place of sutures in closing wounds. The study was published in the May 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The glue, called octylcyanoacrylate tissue adhesive, is awaiting final FDA approval. Quinn found in clinical studies that the glue is less painful to use, quicker to apply than sutures and produces excellent cosmetic results.
The adhesive is similar to crazy glue and some other skin adhesives used in Canada and Europe, but, according to Quinn, it is stronger, more flexible and less toxic. It works by simply squeezing the wound together and applying the glue on top, essentially forming a bridge. It can be used practically anywhere on the body except the hands, feet and around mucous membranes such as the lips. The glue does not have to be removed; it simply wears away as skin cells are sloughed off.
Quinn studied 130 Canadian patients, half of whom were treated with the new skin adhesive while the other half received standard sutures. Quinn says the glue is great for treating children and others who are afraid of needles since it is a virtually pain-free procedure.
"It's not uncommon to have to sedate children in order to repair relatively small wounds. Now we won't have to," he says.
The glue also saved valuable time in the emergency room. The average time to close a wound with the tissue adhesive was three and one-half minutes, while it took doctors 12.5 minutes on average to stitch up a cut.
Finally, a long-term check of both study groups found no appreciable cosmetic differences between wounds closed with the new adhesive and those repaired by conventional stitching.
Another major benefit discovered by Quinn and his colleagues from the University of Ottawa is that infection can be significantly reduced by using the new skin adhesive. In a separate study presented May 19 at the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine in Washington, D.C., Quinn reported that sutured wounds were three times more likely to become infected compared with wounds closed by the new skin adhesive.
The glue is currently applied only on lacerations, but future uses could include burns and abrasions. "This is really the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the adhesive may be used," Quinn says. http://www.mercola.com/2002/jul/17/hair_repair.htm
Researchers may have found a quick, easy and less painful way to close up scalp lacerations -- sealing the wound by gluing patients' hair together.
Doctors in Singapore report that the technique -- dubbed HAT (for hair apposition technique) -- was as good as, if not better than, traditional suturing for closing certain scalp lacerations among their study patients.
The HAT tactic starts with the standard cleansing of the scalp wound, but instead of sewing up the laceration, doctors take hair from both sides of the wound, twist it, then apply special "tissue glue" to hold the hair -- and the wound -- together.
Among the advantages of HAT are speed, reduced pain and no need for shaving the scalp or removing stitches.
The researchers used HAT for 96 patients with scalp lacerations and compared them with 93 given standard sutures. All patients in the HAT group were judged to have "satisfactory" wound healing, compared with about 96% of suture patients. In addition, HAT patients had less pain and scarring, and the procedure generally took about 5 minutes, as opposed to 15 minutes for suturing.
But HAT is not for all patients with scalp lacerations. For example, wounds that are bleeding heavily would do better with sutures, they point out. And because only the outer-most layer of skin is held together by the technique, wounds may more easily break open again.
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion )
Hi - stumbled on this one when going through some old threads.
There's a great thing called "Germolene New Skin" which you paint on your fingertips - although it deadens the sound a tiny bit it does save your fingers from being shredded in a loud gig or a pub session, especially if you need to save your fingers for a concert.
I live in the UK so I don't know if you can get this stuff elsewhere.
Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion :-))
Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
As the players of string instruments among us know, we develop callouses on the tips of our fingers through playing regularly. A good thing too as I remember how damned sore it was when I first started to play guitar.
I was wondering if any members indulge in any activities e.g washing dishes (I treated myself to a dishwasher a few years ago to avoid this problem) or swimming which would tend to soften the callouses on their fingers. Can anything be done to prevent or remedy this? Once, I tried applying a special spirit but ran out of patience. These days, I have much more time to practise and this compensates for my visits to the swimming pool, although I still have to allow a couple of hours after a swim before playing in a session etc.
The upside of taking such exercise is that my arms and fingers are much more supple and flexible and I am less lethargic when it comes to playing an instrument. You might suggest that I should visit the gym instead but , at the moment, I swim about 3 or 4 times a week without adverse effects so I've probably got the balance about right.
John
# Posted on November 17th 2003 by Johannes J
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
Wear a pair of surgeon's gloves!
# Posted on November 17th 2003 by breandan
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
Playing the cello toughens and thickens the skin on the finger tips - but doesn't cause callouses as such.
Trevor
# Posted on November 17th 2003 by lazyhound
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
Put superglue on the tips of your fingers.
Also good for mending cuts on your fingers when band-aids get in the way of playing, broken fingernails, etc. I use it all the time. Just take care not to bond your fingers together, haha.
Cara
# Posted on November 17th 2003 by carafiddle
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
I'm with Cara on the superglue, and I'd add that you should find the stuff that comes in liquid form, with a brush for application. Home Depot and places like that all have it.
# Posted on November 18th 2003 by vulcan666
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
Cara, are you EVER going to put up the dots for Mr. Fog Goes to Baltimore? Pleeeeease? I still tell that story and still get huge belly laughs off it...
# Posted on November 18th 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
Bloody hell! Be carefull with that stuff! Acrylic adhesives are classed as skin irritants. And the fumes are harmfull. I would strongly suggest never to apply any acrylic adhesive willfully onto your skin. Never. And if you do get some spillage, clean it off as quickly as you can.
I'm just so staggered that people here could recommend that. Like saying to a flute player - smoke 60 a day - good for your lungs - look at all the crap it helps you to cough up. They must be cleaning your lungs out.
# Posted on November 18th 2003 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
Don't worry, Danny. I'd be a bit dubious about trying such a thing and, as I said, I practise quite a lot so I don't have any real problems with my finger tips getting too soft. I was just wondering if this caused a problem for other members.
John
# Posted on November 18th 2003 by Johannes J
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
So, I once worked as a secretary in a hydrogeology firm. Our guys would go out to the nearest polluted site and help clean it up, identify and target various problems, etc. So, one of the guys in our NY office got married while I worked there, and he and his new wife moved out two days after their wedding day. He busied himself saving the world from us and our industrial and military waste immediately, and she started moving them into their new home. The kitchen cabinets needed painting, so she spent a day painting them. When Doug came home to his new house and wife, she was up to her elbows in toluene, cleaning off her brushes and "getting the paint off her hands". "Holy hell!" he yelled, "what the *bleep* are you DOING?!?" All he could think of, he told me the next day, was that here he was out heroically and idealistically saving the world from toxic waste every day and he goes home to his wife, who is systematically poisoning herself to make their home pretty.
# Posted on November 18th 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
thats a good story Zina! I wouldnt ever consider glueing cuts together - seems very unatural to me.
# Posted on November 18th 2003 by bb
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
Well I know of a guitarist who got a nasty slice on the tip of a lefthand finger right before an imporant gig. So he got out the Superglue and went to work, only to glue his middle and ring fingers together!
John J, soaking in the pool does prune up my fingers horribly, but I'd rather not talk about what it does to my other memb...
Sorry, was that last call already?
# Posted on November 18th 2003 by Will CPT
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
Great Story Will - that really just made me burst out laughing! hilarous! What happenend in the end? Did he still go on and play? Anybody got anymore superglue stories??
# Posted on November 18th 2003 by bb
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
No, he had to cancel. Said he felt like his lefthand was a loser in a three-legged race....
# Posted on November 19th 2003 by Will CPT
Well, you did ask!...
A glue with essentially the same properties as superglue (although stronger, more fexible and less toxic) is in fact sometimes used in emergency medicine as an alternative to sutures; it's important to glue only the *outermost* layer of skin, and *to avoid* layering the glue in between the cut surfaces of the wound so as to capture it within the healing tissue. It's also advisable to avoid glueing together physician and patient! A collegue (himself a clinician) had a nasty cut successfully closed this way by medics after injuring himself skiing, and I had a foot laceration similarly treated in A and E. There's a legend that superglue (or its precursor) was developed as a quick way of patching up wounded soldiers in the Vietnam war (or Korean, that's how shakey I am on that particular legend!) ....
A websearch threw up the following research, just for starters: (apologies for the length!)
http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/052197/medical.htm
A medical version of Super Glue is proving superior to stitches in closing many types of wounds. Gluing wounds shut was faster, less painful and resulted in healed skin that looked just as good, a study of 130 emergency patients found. Also, gluing seems to avert some of the infections that occur in stitched wounds. The glue eliminates the need for stitch removal, because it sloughs off along with the outer layer of skin after a couple of weeks.
Super Glue's ability to bond skin is well known. The household glue contains a warning that it can instantly stick fingers together, and youngsters occasionally do just that or seal their eyelids shut. The study of the medical uses of such glue was led by Dr. James Quinn of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and was published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.
''This relatively painless and fast method of wound repair can replace the need for suturing several million lacerations a year,'' the researchers said. The study received financial support from the manufacturer of the glue, Closure Medical Corp. of Raleigh, N.C.
Glues of the type used belong to a group of adhesives called cyanoacrylates, first described in 1949. The glue in the study, octylcyanoacrylate, is new and still experimental but is expected to be approved for U.S. marketing as early as this summer, according to the University of Michigan. Similar glues called butylcyanoacrylates have been use to repair wounds for years in other countries, including Canada, where the study was conducted at Ottawa General Hospital in Ontario.
Such glues also have been successful in grafting skin, bone and cartilage; repairing eyes; closing dangerously ballooned blood vessels in the abdomen; and stopping spinal-fluid leaks. The new glue is better than the ones used abroad because it is stronger and more flexible, the researchers said. But it cannot be used on the hands, feet or moist skin areas such as the lips because it will wear off before the wounds heal. Also, it is weaker than stitches.
Doctors in the study repaired wounds by applying the glue to skin on both sides and pressing the skin together for 30 seconds.
Three of the 65 patients whose wounds were glued shut had to be glued again when the wounds broke open; only one of the 67 stitched patients had to be stitched again. (Some patients had multiple wounds and were both glued and stitched.) Wound reopenings all were successfully repaired. The only other complication was an infection in a stitched patient. An expert not associated with the research or the manufacturer predicted wide acceptance of medical super glues. ''It is not too far-fetched to speculate that these products might eventually become available for home use,'' said Dr. Alexander T. Trott of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.
http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/9697/Jun11_97/artcl07.htm
Remember all those warnings about "crazy-gluing" your fingers together? If a Medical Center physician has his way, emergency rooms all over the United States will be using something similar in place of stitches.
James Quinn, clinical assistant professor, has completed an extensive study of a skin adhesive that takes the place of sutures in closing wounds. The study was published in the May 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The glue, called octylcyanoacrylate tissue adhesive, is awaiting final FDA approval. Quinn found in clinical studies that the glue is less painful to use, quicker to apply than sutures and produces excellent cosmetic results.
The adhesive is similar to crazy glue and some other skin adhesives used in Canada and Europe, but, according to Quinn, it is stronger, more flexible and less toxic. It works by simply squeezing the wound together and applying the glue on top, essentially forming a bridge. It can be used practically anywhere on the body except the hands, feet and around mucous membranes such as the lips. The glue does not have to be removed; it simply wears away as skin cells are sloughed off.
Quinn studied 130 Canadian patients, half of whom were treated with the new skin adhesive while the other half received standard sutures. Quinn says the glue is great for treating children and others who are afraid of needles since it is a virtually pain-free procedure.
"It's not uncommon to have to sedate children in order to repair relatively small wounds. Now we won't have to," he says.
The glue also saved valuable time in the emergency room. The average time to close a wound with the tissue adhesive was three and one-half minutes, while it took doctors 12.5 minutes on average to stitch up a cut.
Finally, a long-term check of both study groups found no appreciable cosmetic differences between wounds closed with the new adhesive and those repaired by conventional stitching.
Another major benefit discovered by Quinn and his colleagues from the University of Ottawa is that infection can be significantly reduced by using the new skin adhesive. In a separate study presented May 19 at the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine in Washington, D.C., Quinn reported that sutured wounds were three times more likely to become infected compared with wounds closed by the new skin adhesive.
The glue is currently applied only on lacerations, but future uses could include burns and abrasions. "This is really the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the adhesive may be used," Quinn says.
http://www.mercola.com/2002/jul/17/hair_repair.htm
Researchers may have found a quick, easy and less painful way to close up scalp lacerations -- sealing the wound by gluing patients' hair together.
Doctors in Singapore report that the technique -- dubbed HAT (for hair apposition technique) -- was as good as, if not better than, traditional suturing for closing certain scalp lacerations among their study patients.
The HAT tactic starts with the standard cleansing of the scalp wound, but instead of sewing up the laceration, doctors take hair from both sides of the wound, twist it, then apply special "tissue glue" to hold the hair -- and the wound -- together.
Among the advantages of HAT are speed, reduced pain and no need for shaving the scalp or removing stitches.
The researchers used HAT for 96 patients with scalp lacerations and compared them with 93 given standard sutures. All patients in the HAT group were judged to have "satisfactory" wound healing, compared with about 96% of suture patients. In addition, HAT patients had less pain and scarring, and the procedure generally took about 5 minutes, as opposed to 15 minutes for suturing.
But HAT is not for all patients with scalp lacerations. For example, wounds that are bleeding heavily would do better with sutures, they point out. And because only the outer-most layer of skin is held together by the technique, wounds may more easily break open again.
# Posted on November 19th 2003 by nastyweegirl
SHR
.... (although stronger, more *flexible* and less toxic) ....
# Posted on November 22nd 2003 by nastyweegirl
Re: Protecting your callouses. Another ridiculous discussion
)
Hi - stumbled on this one when going through some old threads.
There's a great thing called "Germolene New Skin" which you paint on your fingertips - although it deadens the sound a tiny bit it does save your fingers from being shredded in a loud gig or a pub session, especially if you need to save your fingers for a concert.
I live in the UK so I don't know if you can get this stuff elsewhere.
# Posted on December 19th 2003 by Mark Harmer