Bones of the Hand

00:01 So, now, let's carry on most distally away from the ulna, away from the radius, and start talking about the wrist and then, the hand. So, the wrist joint is an articulation between the carpal bones and the radius and ulna. And we'll talk about that in more detail.

00:17 Once we extend distally from the carpal bones, we find the metacarpal bones, we have five of those, one for each digit.

00:24 And then, as I mentioned at the very beginning, we have the phalanges which form the very end digits of the fingers.

00:31 So, let's have a look at the carpal bones.

00:33 We have eight of these in total and they're formed into two rows of four.

00:38 So, here, we can see the proximal carpal bones. And then, we'll have a series of distal carpal bones.

00:43 We have four in each row and we have eight in total.

00:47 Starting from lateral and in the proximal row, we have scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, and pisiform.

00:57 We then, move to the lateral aspect of the distal row, we have trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, and hamate.

01:06 So, we have eight different carpal bones that form the wrist.

01:10 There's various features on those and you may be able to find various pneumonics on the internet to help you remember them. An important one is the scaphoid and that is often fractured.

01:20 We'll come back to it throughout this course. Two rows of four carpal bones, proximal and distal, scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, from the four on the proximal row and trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, and hamate form the distal four.

01:38 Now, let's have a look at the metacarpal bones. We have five of these.

01:43 The first one is associated with thumb.

01:46 You can see that most laterally when in the anatomical position and each of these has a base, it has a shaft, and it has a head. The head is going to articulate with the proximal phalange of the fingers.

01:58 So, let's have a look at these phalanges. The thumb or the first digit only has two whereas digits two, three, four, and five each have three. So, here, we can see the proximal phalanges and we can see that each of these itself has a base, a shaft, and a head.

02:17 So, each of these long bones, however the length it is, is relative so the humerus is a long, long bone, whereas these phalanges are a short long bone.

02:26 They all have the same characteristics, a base, a shaft, and a head which we can see there.

02:32 We can then see, we have the proximal phalanges and the middle phalanges.

02:35 But we only have middle phalanges on digits two, three, four, and five as indicated here.

02:41 The thumb, the first digit, only has two and here, we can see the distal phalanges for all five digits.

02:48 The thumb, the first digit, only having two.