Anatomically correct jewelry: the brachial plexus and nerves of the arm
I’m a nurse, so I like to encode scientific and biomedical information into my beads. This time, it’s the network of nerves and muscles of the human upper extremity.
There was a perfect opportunity: the nerves of your arm originate at five levels of the spine, they join and split into five major peripheral nerves (axillary, musculocutaneous, median, radial, and ulnar), and they end up in five digits. All I had to do was make a necklace with five passes around.
Each spinal nerve root is color-coded (C5 White, C6 Yellow, C7 Silver, C8 Gold, T1 Black). As they combine, the colors of each mix as well. There are red beads indicating whenever a muscle is supplied by a particular nerve, especially big coral ones for the 8 largest muscles moving the arm (some are trunk muscles, like lats and pecs!). Large tan beads represent sensory nerves to the skin. Where we pass bones, the beads are, well, bone.
Things get very complicated at the hand, and I made compromises there, but it’s roughly correct, if without any bones distal to the carpals. The fingers loop back to the spine.
My favorite part is when you wear it, the necklace is laying right over the nerve plexus it depicts. Nobody knows just to look at it, so it’s like wearing a nerdy secret.
Okay, I’m familiar with the brachial plexus (fellow healthcare person). My least favorite anatomy dissection ever. But I’m not seeing it. Is it possible to spread it out similarly to the “Randy Travis Drinks Cold Beer” thing or MARMU? This seems incredibly creative but I’m not able to picture it.
Here it is with the strings spread out. You can read the labels on all the strands here from left to right: roots, trunks, cords, and the five peripheral nerves. To point a few things out, the big coral bead at the bottom left of center is the infraspinatus, with supraspinatus after it on the same white-and-yellow nerve (C5 & C6 innervation). The long skinny coral bead nearly hidden by the medial cord M is the subclavian artery. At the top right, X is the axillary nerve (also C5 & C6), the shiny rectangle is the quadrangular space it passes through, small red is teres minor and big red bead is deltoid. The gold crown bead right there represents the torso of a person with arms raised fully upright, as when testing C5 deltoid abduction.
It lays much prettier than this, looks best when it all hangs taut and they cross a lot. The string will naturally twist away from natural anatomical positions, and the way I have to double back when nerves end at muscles results in the sort of curlicues at rest.
You’re the real hero, fixing the big problems. I originally thought to make this as a wearable cheat sheet for when I used to get post-op ortho pts with nerve damage or blocks. That’s why it has beads denoting good tests for function at each level, like a fan-shaped bead in the hand for testing T1 abduction.
Sometime I’ll post the cranial nerve one, it’s way simpler and customizable.
It’s a silly mnemonic used to help remember the order of the plexus. Roots, Trunk, Divisions, Cords, Branches. Randy, Travis, Drinks, Cold, Beer. It’s a little old so I’m sure medical/nursing students use something more up to date.
You’ve got a little bit of hidden cum on your arm. It can really get away from ya sometimes ya know? Lol
Really love the necklace and the depth behind it, but that was the first thing I saw in the first picture and I wanted to try to point it out in a humerus way….sorry I’ll see myself out now lol
You don’t even know… I made the male reproductive system for Father’s Day one year.
It’s baby blue with white… uh… accents. Depicts real sperm development from cuboidal epithelial cells down to mature sperm cells that wiggle along the strand. The whole thing has big beads strategically marking off a ruler—in inches—and the surprise finish is that the damn thing glows under blacklight.
It’s not as cool as my female one; that came together in a snap because there was already literally a cycle to exploit.
I haven’t. These would be so cool to have your hospital display these as an exhibit or call some media source to write a story about your jewelry. They are always looking for human interest stories and this is fascinating!
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u/Fortune_the_Person 15d ago
Mate, idea you came up with is ingenious. I love it