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Finger prick difficulties

the.candy.man said:
after playing bass guitar for a few years, my skin on my finger tips is too tough to get blood out, even with multiple stabbing on the highest setting. i just use my fore arm aswell. takes a few goes to get enough blood out, but with such a lack of nerve endings its much less painfull. its rare i even feel the lancet. also, hypo-shakes and shakey hands make it kinda hard to test witout making a mess. not realy an issue on the fore arm.
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It's the side of the fingertips where you draw blood from, as an ex-guitarist myself I never had a problem.
 
I used to run my fingers under hot water did not do for me, now I use an alcohol wipe they are cheap from Amazon and it opens the pours on the finger, though I find my thumb is the best and the easiest. I always use a new lancer each time as advised by diabetic nurse.
 
For some reason my little fingers and the ring fingers bleed very easily, but the middle, index and thumbs seem to be tougher.
 
Blood obtained via skin puncture is a mixture of undetermined proportions of blood from arterioles, venules, capillaries, plus interstitial and intracellular fluids. For BG testing, you want as good a supply of capillary blood as possible. If you look down this page your will see a section entitled Top 10 Keys to Obtaining a High Quality Capillary Blood Specimen

http://www.bd.com/vacutainer/labnotes/Volume20Number1

Usually, when you do get a bad sample, you can tell. I have been expecting a 7 say and suddenly I get a 10. I do the test again and invariably get something nearer to what was expected. I also notice each finger gives me a different result, apparantly due to the way blood circulates. It is a mystery to me why I burn up some glucose whilst my blood travels from my index finger to my middle finger but it is a regular 0.3 mmol/L difference.
 
Van1946 said:
I used to run my fingers under hot water did not do for me, now I use an alcohol wipe they are cheap from Amazon and it opens the pours on the finger, though I find my thumb is the best and the easiest. I always use a new lancer each time as advised by diabetic nurse.
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I've always be told not to use alcohol, this is certainly the UK position (and here in France too) I'm not certain how evidence based it is. The guidelines for testing from Great Ormond Street say

Rationale 19: Alcohol toughens the skin when used frequently.
Rationale 20: Alcohol and white soft paraffin can interfere with strip and meter analysis and may give incorrect results.
but they don't give a reference for the evidence.
I've found lots of sites that suggest that alcohol can give false low results but not found any evidence. There is evidence that alcohol doesn't remove residue from fruit and may cause a false high!
If you use them the advice seems to be to make sure that it is dry before testing.

I never use thumbs and forefingers, because that was what I was told. I think this is less evidence based. The idea is that you don't want to damage the nerve endings in the digits that are most useful to you (indeed I once read someone was told that they would need good feeling if they needed to learn braille :roll: )
 
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