Should you stop cracking your knuckles?
bbc.com
bbc.com
These articles on knuckle cracking never seem to say anything but state, but sort of maybe could be but your aunt is almost certainly wrong unless or maybe in certain exceptions. For the majority of people I think we crack our knuckles for the same reason we often stretch when we get up, it relieves a tension that needs relieving.
Now I get maybe one crack every few weeks but the magic is gone.
Same for my hands. I was "voracious" cracker, now my fingers get 10% of the cracks I used to get.
I still am able to crack my back, lower back by tugging on my belt and that releases a lot of uumpf. For upper back, I lay on my back, put my knuckles below the spine and go down one by one. Satisfying.
I also have a problem. Every time I stand for a long time, do some work standing up, my lower back is like dead. So I get someone to get on my sacro-illiac joint I think and a loud crack and I'm fit as a fiddle. I'm weird
But I am not sure whether it is a real "tension" or something my brain makes up to force me crack my knuckles which gives some perceived relief. Maybe I am just addicted to this relief.
I haven't seen any research on this urge to crack and the possible tension. Is this a physical tension, some psychologically perceived tension due to an addiction, or something else?
I was just referring to the "urge" to crack my fingers. I thought, maybe this instant relaxation (with additional auditive feedback) results in an addiction which creates or increases my urge to crack.
Don’t overthink it! =]
The article provides some hints at least but I wish there'd be more research on this topic:
> For some people, cracking can provide a sense of relief and a temporary increase in joint mobility, because it stretches the joint, taking it through a wider range of motion. One theory even suggests that cracking stimulates nerve endings around the joint, relaxing surrounding muscles while reducing pain and releasing endorphins – but this hasn't been proven.
Maybe that bubble is supposed to be there.
then there is 'forced' cracking, which will be more difficult to do because its actually going to crack things that are un healthy. it destroy some soft crap between the bones.
both are not healthy but first is much less destructive and wont lead to chronic issues as fast/often as the later which much more often has that result later..
the second forced one u rly need to put some pressure or pull them hard etc its not about getting rid of that stiffness u talk about.
i did that for 15 years and my fingers/hands are fine. (stopped playin so that also went away eventually, mostly)
It's interesting to know that it's gas collapsing. And nothing to do with the bone rubbing.
And it makes you wonder what chiropractors are actually doing when they're popping your back... It's probably not doing anything to help you with your pain. And it's probably not actually adjusting anything.
I acknowledge that this is not the only view on the history.
Chiros started as a scam, continued as a scam, and are now a widely accepted scam. The legit work they do is often just physical therapy.
Just go to a physical therapist.
In my area someone's insurance might cover the first 3-4 sessions of physical therapy, but nothing after that despite them needing it for longer. So the physical therapist will at the end of insurance billing send them down the road to do the exact same thing at the chiropractor for significantly cheaper.
In places without a lot of manual labor they are probably mostly just the quackery. Their clients are lots of hypochondriacs and office workers who really just need to get more exercise but are willing to find anyone who says they can make them better without significant effort. Im sure the massages and stretching does feel good though atleast, but im sure a massage parlor would set out some crystals and do a massage for cheaper.
Yeah, but them very same type of folks (like where I grew up in "rancher territory") who can't (or won't) regularly spend on "woowoo crap" will happily budget a reasonable monthly (or even weekly) fee for a bit of good advice, some stretching exercises and "adjustments", and a bit of basic applied physical therapy techniques that provide a measure of genuine relief. That's how chiropracters in "farm country" make their money.
They basically are as you say "practicing physical therapy" (and some other similar and related services) under a different license (chiropractic). If they didn't provide a valid service in places like that, they'd be outta business downright quick-like, because them small-ish towns, word gets around pretty quick if you done somethin' bad like scammin' a hard-workin' neighbor with "woowoo crap".
Because rural areas are immune to scams or quackery? I think you'll find them just as immune as city folk.
Oh, well as long as they're only practicing medicine without a license, I suppose that's okay then...
Psychiatrists are also Doctors of Medicine and can prescribe medicine. Other mental health professionals (Licensed Professional Therapist, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Psychologist) are not and provide therapeutic interventions.
EDIT: I just realized I'm coming at this from a USA-centric point of view. I have no idea how this applies to other places.
Except at least in the McDonald's case you have to eat food to survive, so you may not have a choice. You don't have to go to a chiropractor to survive, so it's better to not go there at all than it is to go and receive possibly dangerous treatment from a con artist.
Remember, there is no science behind what they do. They don't know if they're going to hurt or paralyze you because they never went to medical school!!
I don't really understand what people need a physical therapist for... They basically just instructed me on how to do exercises that significantly worsened my pain. Brilliant? And then she had the nerve to say riding my bicycle is a bad idea?! Fuck that stupid bitch I never went back.
My chiropractor was much more pragmatic. He asked if bicycling made my back feel better. Guess what?! It does!!!
While a massage therapist or chiropractor does things I can't do to myself. So PT seems kind of like a waste of time and money.
I suggest Bob and Brad on YouTube. Do it at your own pace and do things that actually feel good and don't hurt!
The issue they had is that the data were very noisy due to the SMT being conducted across different populations, with differing frequency, and differing application formats. In any case, if that's the worst our agenda-driven editor could dig up, then I can only conclude that chiropracty is, at the minimum, certainly not a scam.
That's a function of massage which has an large overlap with what chiropractors actually do.
On the other hand, the function of chiropracty is changing the alignment of the spine to solve any and all ailments.
What chiropractors do nowadays isn't really chiropracty any more, it's some combination of PT and massage. It can be effective, I won't deny that but the reason they are doing things to my body is important to me and chiropractors have some odd ideas.
And a lot of treatments are known by the doctor to be fake but are still performed so the player benefits from the placebo effect.
In the sports where the team doctor would routinely administer PEDs to the players under the guise of “vitamins” or whatever, after the practice became harder to pull off some doctors kept administering sugar pills to avoid the nocebo effect. They just follow the ritual that doesn’t harm the player but gives them peace of mind.
Sports science is mostly just guesswork.
I'm talking about the people who own the teams, they invest in chiropractors.
People who are thinking about the ultimate economic benefit of an investment into a human body, not the athletes themselves.
We know by all objective measures that the entire idea is a level of nonsense that's almost religious in scale, which is a great analogy because it similarly demonstrates how "lots of people believe in it" is an absolutely meaningless argument.
Non DO osteopaths are not trained with any sort of scientifically backed curriculum.
Once you're in the program, it's basically the same as an MD program, and then you go through residency programs on an equal basis with MDs.
https://youtu.be/kOzwC5j7UkA?si=sHdHJzzEdn-E2a_N
And their mascot is literally a duck! I think it took me ten years to figure out the quack part here!
The bad ones will kind of just do the same exact routine every time you go there and they'll do the same thing to everyone that goes there -- wham, bam, ty ma'am style -- get you in and out the door as quick as possible! They'll probably pop just about everything they can, which accomplishes not much of anything at all. I guess you'd call that the bruteforce method of chiropracty?
However, a single bad adjustment can painfully linger for weeks.
A good chiropractor for me was Dr. Blake Meyer at DSMCore. He would take a whole half hour and do some targeted deep tissue glute massage and nerve flossing that really helped my sciatica. Then finish up with a few minor adjustments and send me on my way, walking a little taller and straighter and with appreciably less sciatic pain. But don't expect miracles.
I tried a physical therapist near his office but she pushed me too far, too quick and made it worse. So I just stuck with Bob(RIP) and Brad on YouTube and did it at my own pace.
Went to a Orthopedic surgeon, he said my back pain was the cost of walking on two legs.
Then I went to half a dozen cracking Chiropractors, and the were shit.
Finally found one that practiced DNFT (Directional Non Force Therapy), its a close to magic as I have ever seen, but it works wonders. I can sleep, walk, and sit with no pain. Something I never thought I would do again.
> Dr. Blake Meyer is an Iowa native with more than a decade of experience in biomechanics, rehabilitation, and patient-centered care. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Iowa and his Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Palmer College of Chiropractic.
> During his training, Dr. Meyer worked with the Musculoskeletal Biomechanics and Sports Medicine Research Lab at University of Iowa Health Care and the Sports Injury and Rehabilitation Department at Palmer College. He has also completed advanced coursework in physical rehabilitation at the board certification level.
This guy is the real deal. More often than not he didn't pop a single thing on my body, buddy. He would get deep into my glutes and floss my sciatic nerves though and that's very evident-based work. And I referred plenty of people to him and we all love the guy.
You don't need to become the next hulk. If you sit all day, as you get older you can get away with less and less, at some point you need to start exercising (and not just 1 type, a range), your bones don't just hole up your body on their own, building muscle around them fixes a surprising amount of Aches and pains you get as you age.
Maybe it's just me but I always saw gym people are the crazy bodybuilder people, but in this modern day in age most people need some level of gym (a lot of it you can do at home too with minimal gear).
*Talking to people sedentary lower back pain people.
I started sleeping on the floor for a few nights on a doubled thick blanket for slight padding and after the third night (first two were a little rough) I sprang up like an 18 year old and felt like my posture had been improved all day long.
We spend a lot of time in bed and most beds are too soft and lead to distortions is my current theory. I'm thinking about replacing my mattress with one of those reed mats Japanese sleep on.
I had a particularly annoying joint that I have completely stopped cracking - likely the cause was a functional issue that is resolved due to weight loss.
You can scoff at low travel and membranes all you want, but less movement = less fatigue, so I think they’re amazing.
Never thought about the climbing angle, but I’ll chime in and say that after I started climbing I’ve definitely not experienced more fatigue.
In case anyone else comes into this comment section looking for ideas: the thing that helped me the most was adding soft pads to my chair armrests - I found that resting my elbows on the hard surface of the default armrests resulted in forearm pain.
I went the opposite direction- mechanical keyboard, large trackball- and my pain cleared up. The lack of feedback of the flat keyboard was too maddening to get accustomed to for me.
I tried painkiller cream (don't think it helped), wrist brace (pretty much impossible to use mouse with it), wrist exercises (bending/stretching arm) didn't help.
I switched from traditional mouse (HP 255 dual wireless) to my wife's Logitech Lift Vertical (she didn't use and bought based on my recommendation anyway, so replaced with my HP) and the pain/issues were gone in ~2 weeks, not sure if it was thanks to the vertical mouse or if it would gone by itself, but just to be safe I keep using vertical mouse. Later I went to preventive check with my kid to their pediatrician, amusingly noticed he is using exactly same mouse.
Btw. how do you crack your wrist (you mean sudden movement to left/right/up/down)? I crack finger joints, but would never think of cracking the wrist.
Apply a bit of tension to your wrist by closing your fist and squeezing gently as if you were gripping something in your hand, then rotate your hand in a bit. Guaranteed pop for me if I haven't done it in a bit.
The motion follows the wrist's normal movement, which is different to how I crack my fingers- those need to be twisted perpendicular to the normal after curling slightly.
No sudden movement required at all.
it's not unfathomable that someone gave up at their 20th time to come up with such a scheme in the story about storymaking that you figured happened
But I think it's mostly just escaping gases.
Edit: ^ is my way of asking why this is on HN, which I never do, cause then someone could ask the same about me.
I'm definitely in the group where cracking gives temporarily increased mobility, but it's more than that. A joint which is bothering me will most likely feel better if cracked and this can be the difference between very painful to walk, then my knee cracked, instantly the pain was gone.
And usually, a joint which is actively being used will not crack--but if my knees are complaining about a downhill stretch they will feel a lot better if I can crack them.
Also, I can sometimes feel a difference in how a joint moves. It just feels smoother when cracked. I don't understand it but I've wondered if it was somehow tiny bubbles (think cavitation) that don't form if the gas was removed by a crack.
Due to this habit, I have researched the cause of the crack, and this article is absolutely nothing new whatsoever. The same information I've been reading for 50 years, since I was first "ordered" to stop.
For the record: zero issues. Zero ramifications beyond "stop that!" verbalized endlessly through out my life.
"No."
So, I clearly have no synovial fluid at that joint. The tendons were in it, and so by necessity it was also violated.
I just popped that knuckles, and it sounds exactly like the others. Anyone have any ideas?
Everyone would hear it.
The people behind him would see someone turn 180 degrees. Twice. Then he'd go back to listening like nothing happened.
Are people actually doing this as a fun thing because there's nothing better to do?
So the cracking of knuckles annoys people who don't do it, and it annoys women, and it annoys people in authority over young boys. So you want them to stop, and you want to regulate men's bodies and control what we do with our bodies. But you cannot tell us all the time "because I said so" or God forbid, "because it annoys me", because that can eventually achieve the opposite result.
So the medical myth of developing arthrosis and hurting your bones and damaging your joints, those were "old wives' tales" and "white lies" that were told in order to scare boys into stopping the activity. And perhaps even to scare husbands and employees into stopping. They tell men to stop spitting on the floor, to stop picking their nails with a pocket knife, and usually a medical excuse arises, because this is a higher authority that will terminate any individual choice or discretion in the way we treat our bodies.
In other news, media outlets continue to struggle with readership, should they stop debasing the profession?
The article makes a point to mention specifically that excessive/forceful neck cracking can be dangerous, but then switches to just "Cracking your own neck is not recommended"... but to me it sounds like they're referring more to the forceful kind, such as the manipulations on youtube they reference.
I suppose it's like asking people to stop using q-tips... they're probably not going to, and the amount of people accidentally injured from either seems to be quite low.
The reason is legal liability, generally.
If you sell Q-Tips and tell people to be careful when sticking them in their ears you're likely to be held legally liable when someone isn't careful because there will be infinite wiggle room for them to claim you didn't specify the safe use clearly enough.
If you sell Q-Tips and tell people not to put them in their ear (even though you know that's why most people are buying them) then when someone sues you for messing up their ear you can tap the words on the box and say "well, we told you not to do that".
Even when YouTube has videos uploaded by doctors having to put up with this kind of stupidity, it doesn't change the fact that hardly anyone does that. The vast majority of stuff uploaded to YouTube isn't even that. It's losers trying to get views.