When I was a resident at The Montreal Children’s Hospital many, many years ago, I would occasionally get a call from the Emergency Department, because someone had come in (surprisingly, usually an adult) who had a ring on a finger which had become stuck for one reason or another and which they couldn’t remove with their technology.

What medical emergency people usually do for this sort of situation is either to use a ring cutter which is battery-operated and uses a rotary grind wheel to slice through the ring, or a set of special shears which are slipped under the ring and then cut through it. (Don’t worry, the finger is protected by a metal barrier.) Sometimes these tools weren’t strong enough for thick rings and I would get the honour of cutting the ring off.

What that involved was slipping small triangular wedges made of wood between the ring and the skin below to create a space filled with wood, and the use a high-speed drill to slowly and carefully cut through the ring. It’s a little creepy-sounding, but it always worked. The “patient” always walked away happy, even though the ring had a slice through it and couldn’t be worn without being repaired by a jeweller.

All this to say that dental floss can do the job without damaging the ring. I only found this out after I started writing this blog about a year ago and started to research all the weird uses for this marvel of modern health care, which just shows the power of the internet.

Anyway, here’s how: take a good, long length of floss: 30 inches, say (or about 75 centimetres, for you people who live in all the world’s lands outside the United States.) Slip one end of the floss under the ring towards the attached end of the finger by pushing it with a needle or, even better, a plastic loop called a floss threader, then start wrapping the floss around the finger again and again past the knuckle that’s holding the ring back, and make a loose knot at the far end. By pulling on the end of the floss that came through under the ring, and turning it round and round the finger, the floss will slip upwards and the ring will slide down and past the knuckle and – voilà, the ring comes loose. If you can’t visualize this, which I can’t even though I just described it, I’ve included a short video to help out. After all, a picture is worth… 1001 words.