If you crack your knuckles or back will you get arthritis?!
Question: Me and my friends crack our knuckles and back, wrists and ankles, and toes, basically everything but our necks. Will this affect our bones by giving us arthritis or making them swell or anything bad like that??
Answers: Me and my friends crack our knuckles and back, wrists and ankles, and toes, basically everything but our necks. Will this affect our bones by giving us arthritis or making them swell or anything bad like that??
No, it's just releasing the air that builds up between your bones.. almost like your bones getting gas.. and the popping noise is from the bubbles being popped. You wont get arthritis.. that's a myth.
You wont get arthitis BECAUSE of this but if you get it this will cause it to be worse and you could end up with a worse grip due to arthritis AND popping your knuckles...
FYI: when yu pop your knuckles the *pop* you hear is the sound ofthe air escaping at high speed.
I would recommend you dont continue this.
I don't know that it will give you arthritis but I do know that I had an RN tell me that it would make your knuckles bigger than if you didn't. I have arthritis really bad in all my joints and I did that, but I am not saying that cracking myself all over did it. I think that I would check with a doctor before I continued it.It couldn't hurt. I don't think that anyone of them would tell you wrong, and any one at a teaching hospital would tell person in a heartbeat. Your own doctor would tell you when you go in for something else if you ask. But, I know that it is very painful for me to attempt to crack anything now. IF I try to crack my back or knuckles they pain like crazy. They swell a lot.
Sharon
Likely not. I'm not saying "definitely no" because, while cracking knuckles is common, research on its effects is not. We have only a handful of studies on the subject. None shows a definite link between knuckle cracking and arthritis.
However, cracking your knuckles is neither harmless nor desirable. The arthritis connection may be an old wives' tale, but cracking your knuckles can hurt your hand in other ways, and there's no benefit to it. Some students crack their knuckles after writing a great deal, but cracking knuckles isn't a solution for writer's cramp. Instead, take a break, and bend and stretch out your fingers a few times.
Kids may develop a habit of cracking their knuckles because they like the sound. The "crack" comes because of a change in the synovial fluid, the lubricant that bathes the joints. When finger bones are suddenly stretched apart, the space between the joints widens, and an air bubble forms in the synovial fluid. The bubble quickly bursts and makes a sharp sound.
Nature did not intend us to repeatedly stretch the ligaments of the finger joints. I found two medical articles that talked about patients who had injured their hands from knuckle cracking. One over-stretched his ligaments and dislocated his fingers. Another partially tore the ligament in her thumb.
In 1990, a researcher looked at the hand function in 200 adults, age 45 and above. He didn't find a greater tendency toward arthritis in the 74 habitual knuckle crackers, but the knuckle crackers were more likely to have swollen hands and reduced hand strength. However, an accompanying editorial posed this idea: Perhaps a person must have looser-than-average ligaments in order to crack knuckles in the first place. And those loose ligaments and joints may set the person up for other sorts of joint damage.
In another study, published back in 1975, the researcher visited an old age home and asked patients whether or not they had cracked their knuckles when they were young. He found 15 who remembered they had, and 13 who remembered they had not. When the researcher X-rayed their hands, and compared the two groups, he found no difference in arthritis rates.
What does cause arthritis? There are many kinds of arthritis, but the most common, osteoarthritis, is a function of age and genetic predisposition. If you X-ray hands of people age 65, 70 percent will have arthritis. Osteoarthritis tends to be a bit worse in the dominant hand.
The bottom line: While cracking knuckles may not get you arthritis faster, it won't win you many fans and might injure those fingers in other ways. So it's best not done.
most ppl say it WILL give you athritis.
i believe it will because i used to crack my knucles...ALL THE TIME and i was doing sumthing, and my fingers just FROZE!!! so i wouldnt crack anything on purpose if i were you. you could end up damaging bones.
hope this helps!