Right or left, practice makes perfect and gives you a balanced approach

IN his interesting column headlined ‘Right versus Left: Politics of the Body’ (Irish Examiner, January 1), Richard Collins shows that the issues raised by right/left dominance apply to animals as well as humans.

Dominance shows up in terms of hands, feet and brain hemispheres.

As approximately 90% of us have right dominance, our world is arranged mainly to suit this tendency. That makes things inconvenient for people with left dominance.

Yet with training, as dedicated sports people show, those affected can develop their right hands, feet and brain hemispheres to cope well. Left-handers have trained to write and do other things fluently with their right hands when their left hands were too damaged to do so.

Some people fear to do this lest they upset their brains in some way. The work of Queens University researchers some years ago suggested this was ill-founded.

They used ultrasound scans to detect dominance in wombs and then noted the pattern again three years later.

They found dominance unchanged as womb left-handers were also left-handers later. Since womb dominance preceded the development of the brain, they surmised that limbs dominance was due to connections with their spine rather than their brains.

Damage done by realignment training is caused by the same thing that makes training of any kind cause damage — that is, by use of flawed methods.

Joe Foyle

Sandford Road

Ranelagh

Dublin 6