Lets say that I sliced off the tips of my left and right index fingers. Then I bandaged them ‘together’ (so that the wounded areas are touching).
Would skin/other stuff connect the two after some time? Would they heal into one goofy-looking uber-finger? (Assuming no infection sets in!)
(This will settle a gentlemens bet; I say that that they will heal, my friend says no. Neither of us has the courage to find out…)
Yes.
Others may come along to fill in the details.
My guess would be yes, they would. Because that’s pretty much how they grafted the toe in place of a missing finger on a television special I saw.
Peace,
mangeorge
They would need to be in constant approximation to heal. It would take weeks to bond together tightly. Unless they were actually sutured together I doubt one’s ability to hold that still to make them adhere. But if one could be immobilized well enough at the fingertips, or if the tips were sutured together, they would in all likelihood heal together. If the bone edges were approximated, they would probably fuse also. The nails might be tricky, if they weren’t completely amputated, they could succeed in pushing the digits away from one another.
QtM, MD
So if an insane person were to cut along the sides of their fingers, and then suture the resulting lacerations together, they could end up with flipper hands?
Cool.
Yeah, they would definately heal together. Plastic surgeons take skin and muscle from all parts of the body and sort of stick it where they want it, let it heal, and then slice and reshape. Abdominal and chest skin and muscle is used to reconstruct the breast and face pretty routinely.
I’ve heard that they have to separate the fingers of burn victims so they won’t fuse together.
i wonder if i shall barf, along about now.
Would arteries and veins from both fingers mutually grow together to form a neat two-way bloodflow, or would the blood vessels try to rejoin within their original finger and stay separate? Or would you just end up with a lump of interwoven capillaries?
…was there a plastic surgery procedure that included suturing your forearm to the nose for a while, or do I remember a medical hoax?
Heck, I know that somebody already must have done animal experiments on this.
So would this work if, say, two (albeit twisted) identical twins wanted to become conjoined at the fingertips?
And the flipper-hands idea is cool. 
So, it would actually be possible to cut the tips off all my fingers and rearrange them? That would confuse the fingerprint police!
<wanders off to look for a cleaver…>
I saw a thing on Discovery the other day. A guy got bit by a Rattlesnake and his hand went all funky and necrotic, so they sewed his thumb to his chest to keep the blood flowing in the hand and arm. He had it like that for weeks so they could save the limb. It was really gross.
First, it’s heal to one another. `One and other’ makes precisely no sense. Honestly, did you even read your title?
Or you could do what countless gangsters have done and create a nitric acid fingerbowl. Local anasthetic optional.
Changing the scar patterns every so often is advisable, however.
But your question amuses me. Does anyone know how long skin tissue can sit at room temperature (at a murder scene, say) before it’s worthless for grafting?
This is gonna be the next thing at bme (I’m not linking to it). They’re already self-amputating fingertips & toes. I’m not making it up.
What is BME? I don’t want a link, just an expansion of the abbreviation.
BME = Body Modification EZine.
That’s nothing compared to some of the genital modification you can find pictures of on the net.
Yeah, but that would wipe out my fingerprints entirely, wouldn’t it? So all the police have to do is look for someone without figerprints… bit of a giveaway… but if I could re-arrange my fingers after each crime, they’d never work it out!
<continues search for cleaver (mental note: also look for needle & thread)>