Bionic Thumb

Here we have the bionic thumb. That is a trademark name but this is one of my favorite tools in the dispensary and actually come in a lot of different sizes and colors now as well, but they serve a multitude of purposes in the practice and can really make you look more professional with your patient and give you the right adjustment ability that otherwise you might not do as great.

So, let's look at a frame, the first use of a bionic tool is to give us this proper temple bend. Now if we straighten our temple out, we know what we don't want to have on a temple tip, which is a 90-degree bend. You should never have a bend that you do with your fingers that looks like a 90-degree bend like this. If it looks like this, odds are this frame is too long for the patient and we're trying to accommodate for that. This also induces some uncomfortable pressure on the back of the ear because this is what's holding up the entire frame. So, it's really important to understand how to properly bend a frame and that's where our bionic tool, or our bionic thumb.actually comes in. so if you have a temple that's already bent you can hold the bionic thumb just like this and if I place it against the top of the temple and the temple tip I can actually use it to bend the temple tip against the bionic thumb and it’ll help straighten that temple tip right out.

Now if we want to get a proper bend, we place our thumb in the end, put the padded end on the bottom of our temple tip as we bend against it. We get a nice even bend here. It looks a lot more smooth and follows the natural curvature of the ear, so no matter how sharp that turn needs to be it can look a lot more smooth. One of the things you may have an issue within your practice are flat temples. These flat metal temples are extremely hard to bend because when we do so with our fingers, you'll notice you have this problem, where the temple automatically curves inwards and it's a lot of hassle. So again, we want to take this, flatten the temple completely back out and the best way I found to use this tool was actually the other end of the bionic thumb. So, when I place this end over it and hold it nice and secure, I can actually bend my flat metal temple against it and now I've bent straight down without curving the temple inward, which gives us a lot more smooth bend when we're dealing with different things.

Now the final use of this tool, which a lot of people don't pay attention to but makes our lives a lot easier, is when you're out with a patient at your dispensing table, you can actually use either end of the bionic thumb as a portable bench. Because a lot of times with our screws in our temples, they are hard to get out sometimes and we need to add some pressure. So, if you actually place the frame on top of the felt tip and grab your screwdriver, now you can actually place pressure on your screwdriver to remove or insert screws in the end of a temple.