Standing, sitting or lying supine
Anterior or lateral to the patient.
May I touch your hand? ( or point to the demonstrated area ).
With your palm down, please let your fingers and thumb relax and keep them relaxed. I am placing your wrist in an upward and inward position.
Please hold in this position while I try to move your hand (or demonstrate and this is much easier).
Guide the patient to pronate. Stretch the skin of the dorsum of the hand toward the fingers by contact of the
thenar eminence of the non-palpating hand with the skin on the dorsal hand of the patient. Remind the patient,
if needed, to keep the fingers and thumb relaxed or the extensor tendons of the digits will hide the tendons of
these two muscles. With the patient relaxed, palpate the tendons as they insert on the proximal posterior aspects
of metacarpal 3 and 2. Guide the patient to hold the extended and radially deviated position of the wrist while
you resist with a push on the hand in the direction of flexion and ulnar deviation. Palpate the tendons during
this combined and diagonal motion. Both tendons should be palpable, more than being visible, as both are extensors.
The tendons form a V shape with the more medial brevis tendon inserting into metacarpal 3 and the more lateral
longus tendon inserting into metacarpal 2.
VH -