Hey did you know that just looking at a person's nails can actually give you a ton of information
about how healthy their body is? It's true and we're going to talk about all the different ways
our nails give away secrets right after this. Welcome back my name is Tammy and this is
NurseMinder and on this channel we do everything nursing so if you're new here consider subscribing
below so that you get the next video when it's released. Okay so truly I wish we could go out
and get a manicure right now because these nails are in need of it but you know with COVID we can't
just do those things just yet. So we're going to talk about nails though today and share with you
all the information that these nails give you. For example
how many of you - let me know in the comments below - have a little bit of a nervous habit
that when you're anxious or stressed you try to bite your nails. That we can tell when we look at
your nails and we can see that those nail beds are right or the nail is right down to the nail bed,
that's a clue that you might have a chronic habit, have a lot of stress,
under some strain right now, and so that's one of the things I would ask you about if I saw that.
Now the other thing our nails can tell us is a little bit about self-care activities.
Maybe they don't have facilities to clean their hands so their nails are really dirty
or maybe they work outside and their nails are really dirty so they give us some information
about occupations, about self-care activities ,as well as health status so
when we're focusing on your nails so much and we're looking at them and we're do you know we're
doing all of our assessments, we're really looking at cardiovascular health, respiratory health,
nutritional health and did you know that it can actually tell you and give you information to
whether or not there's a melanoma? True we're going to talk about all those pieces, but first
let's go over what a normal assessment looks like and what you should find. All right so let's begin
our assessment here looking at the nails. We're first going to inspect the nails looking at the
shape and the contour of each individual nail bed to make sure there is consistency,
and what we're looking for is that the nail bed itself should be slightly curved or flat
and the skin that surrounds the nail so the posterior portion, on each nail and the lateral
portion, so that's both sides here, that should be smooth and rounded so, oftentimes what we'll
see is if someone has an occupation where they have to wash their hands a lot - that this area
will be dry and cracked or even a bit red due to the ongoing irritation of the skin
so that's one of the clues we can get from looking at our nail beds is the occupation.
You can look at the nail beds to see how clean they are, that's also going to give us information
about their occupation, and if they have bitten those nails down right down to the surface here
that might give us some insight into their emotional or psychological state
and tell us that they may be nervous or they have these chronic habits.
then we're looking from the side so we're going to take a profile view here of the index finger
and what you're going to notice is as the skin of your finger meets the nail bed that there's a
little bit of a dip here, and that's natural, and then the nail bed rises up that is also natural
we would expect this to be about 160 degrees, and this would be a normal finding in terms of looking
at the side profile. Now when it comes looking at consistency of the nail surface we're looking
to make sure that it is round sorry not round we're looking to make sure that it is smooth
and regular but what that means is there's no brittle nails, there's no splitting of the nails,
and that the nail thickness is uniform, and so we want to be checking this thickness as well because
we know fungal infections is one of those things that will cause them to change and become thick.
When it comes to looking at the color we're looking now through this what we call a
transparent window, this is like looking through the window into the into the health of your body,
and what you should notice is that throughout all of the five fingers you can see an even pink tone
throughout all of them. Now when it comes to this lower half moon, not everybody's going to be able
to see this but it's typically white it's called a lunula, a little bit more dominant on your thumb,
you can see this beautiful half moon here and that will be a normal finding. So if
it's absent that's not a problem either but just let you know that if it's white that's the color
it should be. If it's different colors that also will give us signs or information into different
things so maybe the color that you're noticing is blue and if it's blue then that might look
um might be connected to diabetes or if it is brown or black it might be fluoride or
renal disease, silver poisoning might be a blue-gray. So this little nail here can give
us a lot of information as well. Now of course the nail bed itself if it's a different color,
if we've got some blue coloring on here I'd be worried about respiratory conditioning so,
all right and the last thing we're going to do is check capillary refill.
So capillary refills - we're going to come along and we're going to pinch this
and it'll go pale as I pinch down, and then you watch the color come back. so I'll come
up a little closer so you can see how pink that is. Now we're going to press down,
it loses the color and we count how long it takes for that to come back - one thousand one,
that's very quickly. Typically it is three seconds or less. So we are going to check
and you see how that comes back very quickly if it takes too long then there's something
to look into for the cardiovascular system. All right, so now I love pictures and this
comes from vitaminshop.com and it talks about the health of your fingernails and I thought
I would just use this image and shout out to them for doing such a great job. So here we have,
if you've got brittle nails - which let me tell you sometimes mine are - this can be just
from washing your hands a lot and you want to just keep them moisturized but it can also signal that
you have poor nutrition such as low vitamin A, vitamin C or biotin and here they add that it
also can indicate hypothyroidism so our nails are so important at giving us clues. Yellowing nails,
especially if it's thickened, would be more likely due to fungal infection, but here
they're sharing that this can be a condition of diabetes, hypothyroidism, psoriasis - so we want
to be making sure that anything other than normal is being checked out by a physician.
Nail pits and depressions, psoriasis, alopecia. Vertical ridges - now this is common with iron
deficiency anemia and we'll see this in older people more so as they age as well but checking
out your iron stores. If you have horizontal ridges we're looking at zinc deficiencies,
again diabetes is such a root cause of a lot of different changes in our body
and maybe some kidney conditions here. Now here's the dark streaks. Now this can sometimes connect
to melanoma and we want to make making sure we definitely get that checked out but it can also
be related to heart infection psoriasis and just a simple broken blood vessel.
Okay, now I wanted to share this tweet here by Avraham Cooper who's a physician and he's
talking about clubbing - how cool is this as I'm making my video there it is - so what's
interesting about clubbing is we typically think of this as a respiratory symptom but in fact it
can be related to lung cancer to tuberculosis to inflammatory bowel disease. so the most important
thing here is that we want to get it checked out. Now when we look at the picture what you
notice is there's definitely a discoloring of the nail bed but you can see how it's kind of widened
here at the phalange and the nail bed is kind of flattened and at the tip here it actually curves
down so we're going to show another picture here for you as well - so you see here how we have the
normal nail bed if you were to do this with your nails right now you would have this gap here and
your nail beds would be touching. With clubbed fingers we lose that gap but in fact here's
where you see that curving of the nail bed down and this is a classic sign of clubbing. Okay now
this here is from the mayo clinic the Mayo clinic is an amazing resource but talking about spoon
nails now is something I've never seen before but they talk about how it's related to iron
deficiency anemia or a liver condition known as hemochromatosis. So now with Terry's nails,
you'll notice here that most of the nail looks fairly white but then there's this pink band
up at the top of the nail just before the nail leaves the skin and so this is can be a sign of
again liver disease, congestive heart failure, kidney failure, or diabetes. So now both lines as
you can see on these nails there is actually like this horizontal line these are indentations on the
lines and I wanted to show you this one because if we have a zinc deficiency that's one of the
symptoms you might have but this is also connected with several other potential conditions such as
scarlet fever, measles, mumps, and pneumonia. all right so that's a wrap for today now what we did
cover was the normal assessment findings and they gave you some information on things that might
cause an abnormal finding in your nail assessment. We spend a lot of time looking at these babies so
let's make sure we're picking up those clues when they present and you just might be the next person
to help identify an issue in your patients. Let me know in the comments below if you yourself
have picked up on something that has changed the course of your patients care, I'd love to
hear your success stories. As always subscribe to this channel let me know this is the content
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next release comes out happy to have had you here today and make it a great day.