A Great St. Louis Invention To Prevent Infection!
Posted by Sonny Saggar on Mon, Jan 02, 2012 @ 03:15 PM
Urgent Matters THE blog for 'The Non-Emergency Room'.
The fist bump (also called Fo' Knucks or knuckle bump and knuckle touch) is a gesture similar in meaning to a handshake or high five. A fist bump can also be a symbol of giving respect. It can be followed by various other hand and body gestures and may be part of a dap greeting. It is commonly used in baseball as a form of celebration with teammates, and with opposition players at the end of a game.
The gesture is performed when two participants each form a closed fist with one hand and then lightly tap the front of their fists together. The participant's fists may be either vertically-oriented (perpendicular to the ground) or horizontally-oriented. Unlike the standard handshake, which is typically performed only with each participants' right hand, a fist bump may be performed with participants using either hand.
According to St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the fist bump was created by Hall of Famer Stan Musial as a way to prevent getting colds from shaking so many hands.
Time magazine cites knuckle bumping in the 1970s with
NBA player Baltimore Bullets guard Fred Carter. Th
e "fist bump" or "pound" can easily be traced as far back as the late 1800s and early 1900s to the boxer's handshake as a way to greet when hands are gloved
.In fact, the fist bump's origins may well lie in the animal kingdom as the gesture is natural behaviour observed in primates, according to a book published by Margaret Power in 1991.
Someone helped popularize the fist bump in the early 1990s. Michael Jordan extended his hand in a fist bump to all the opponents on the court prior to the opening of the game, starting a new trend.
On June 3, 2008, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama fist bumped during a televised presidential campaign speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the gesture became known as "the fist bump heard 'round the world".
In light of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the dean of medicine at the University of Calgary, Tomas Feasby, suggested that the fist bump may be a "nice replacement of the handshake" in an effort to prevent transmission of the virus.
At St. Louis Urgent Cares, we are proud to be part of the greatest city in the world, as well as the one that brought you a drug-free method to fight the spread of infection around the planet. Therefore, we would like to announce that our staff will pr
efer to fist-bump you instead of shake your hand, when we greet you upon meeting for the first time. I guess we could bow, to really prevent infections! Seriously though, all those Purell hand sanitizers that have been placed outside all the patient exam rooms in every hospital and clinic around the country - could we have just made an announcement that we should all start fist-bumping instead? Now that's the kind of healthcare reform I'm talking about!
I'd like to invite everyone to come in for a demonstration of the fist-bump - the most efficient infection prophylaxis known to humanity. I'm typically here at Downtown Urgent Care on Wednesday mornings if you want to pop in and see me to discuss this revolutionary procedure. The first half of this article was adapted from Wikipedia by the way ;-) but we would like to say that St. Louis Urgent Cares Champion the Fist Bump.
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