Get a grip

...'cause your limp handshakes are creeping me out. I shake a lot of hands in a day. I always greet new patients in the waiting room with a handshake, and a lot of established patients put out their hands when I come out to meet them as well. I try not to think about where those hands have been, particularly during cold and stomach flu season, but I must admit that I often form a first impression from that initial HGS (hand grip strength).

Per ScienceNOW Daily News, "Hand grip strength (HGS) is an inherited trait; about 65% of a person's grip strength is genetically determined, whereas the remaining 35% depends on training and developmental factors such as nutrition." So I shouldn't judge the dead fish approach to greeting, their hands limp in mine, because these people are either born that way or they're malnourished. But evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup suggests that there's even more information to be gleaned from that impromptu waiting room test of HGS.

After conducting a study of HGS in a group of 143 undergraduates, both men and women, Dr. Gallup notes: "Our conclusion is that hand-grip strength is an honest indicator of fitness." In fact, Hawaiian investigators studied a grip of middle-aged Japanese-American men and concluded that midlife HGS was highly predictive of disability 25 years hence; those who lost their grip early were nearly 3 times as likely to totter unsteadily through their declining years than those with crunchers for handshakes.

So I have missed many opportunities to gaze into the future of those patients who greet me each day. But in the too-much-information department, Dr. Gallup also reports that men with high HGS have sex sooner and with more sexual partners plus were more aggressive in high school. Now I really don't want to know right up front about about the men I meet!