How to Break Your Thumb Ligament

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About

How to Break Your Thumb Ligament is an infographic providing instructions on how to perform a tendonitis test, which falsely claims to provide instructions to break one's thumb ligament. The image was widely circulated online in early January 2017 when various Twitter users claimed to have broken their thumb by following the image's instructions.

Origin

On September 13th, 2015, a Mayo Clinic^[1] infographic demonstrating how to perform a Finkelstein test for Quervain's tendonitis was posted on 9gag^[2] with the title "If you are bored – How to break your thumb ligament."

Spread

The graphic remained relatively unknown until January 5th, 2017, when Twitter user @RahSenpai^[4] posted screenshots of a text message conversation in which a young man named Jonathan breaks his thumb by following the infographic instructions (shown below). Within five days, the tweet gained over 217,000 likes and 118,000 retweets.

That day, Twitter users @lfw_lm^[6] and @Meli__10^[7] replied to @Rah_Senpai with photographs of their crooked thumbs (shown below). Over the next 24 hours, other Twitter users posted similar photographs in tweets claiming to have broken their thumbs by following the instructions.

On January 6th, 2017, the @Dory^[5] Twitter feed reposted the screenshots. That day, BuzzFeed^[8] published an article about the tweets. On January 9th, Redditor Ragingdark submitted the Finkelstein test graphic to /r/LearnUselessTalents^[3] in a post titled "How to break your thumb ligament."