Associate Professor, Government Theni Medical College, Tamilnadu, India
*Corresponding author: S Nalini, Associate Professor, Government Theni Medical College, Tamilnadu, India. Email id: nalini.santhalingam@gmail.com
Online published on 20 July, 2019.
Whistling without using a whistle or fingers considered as a manly skill in our patriarchal society is taught as a means of testing for integrity of facial muscles and Facial nerve for UG students in I MBBS under clinical examination of VII cranial nerve. But this test has been mentioned only in a very few books of clinical examination. This fact raised the need for this study
To determine percentage of population who can whistle, muscles of head involved in whistling & gender variation
A descriptive, cross sectional study by convenient sampling method conducted among 200 UG MBBS students of age group 18–25 of GTMC.
80% of participants were able to whistle; Whistling is not a manly skill. An element of social inhibition is there in women to whistle; 90.5% of subjects used muscles innervated by both Facial nerve and Hypoglossal nerves simultaneously.
There is subtle knowledge gap between clinicians and non-clinicians probably due to lack of need to update for the later which will become evident to students when they enter clinical side. Hence we, teachers too need to refer clinical subject text books and clinical examination manuals to accept, ignore and criticise as appropriate.
Whistling, Facial nerve, Hypoglossal nerve, blow air test
