Will cracking my knuckles give me arthritis?
Dr Chris van Tullekan questions that piece of perennial parental advice: don鈥檛 crack your knuckles or you鈥檒l get arthritis!
One researcher, Dr Donald Unger, actually cracked the knuckles of his left hand at least twice a day for over 50 years whilst never cracking those on his right hand in order to prove his mother wrong 鈥� he never developed arthritis in either hand, and won an IgNobel award for his efforts in 2009. Of course, one person鈥檚 story isn鈥檛 enough to convince Chris. However, even more scientific studies haven鈥檛 shown any link at all between knuckle cracking and arthritis.
But that doesn鈥檛 mean that you can necessarily crack away with no regard for your joints 鈥� some radiologists think that there is some visible damage on X-rays to knuckle joints caused by continuous cracking of them, and those who crack their knuckles habitually did, in one study, seem to have weaker hand grip 鈥� but it鈥檚 not entirely clear that it was the knuckle cracking itself that was the cause of it.
Whatever the results of it, the noise that puts so many people鈥檚 teeth on edge is not bones rubbing together, or even (except in rare cases) tendons slipping over bones, it鈥檚 actually caused by joints being pulled apart slightly, reducing the pressure in the fluid between them, and causing gases dissolved in the fluid to form bubbles which then burst (a process known as cavitation) 鈥� which is what the 鈥榗rack鈥� sound is. It takes about 20-30 minutes for these gases to redissolve in your joint fluid, meaning that you can鈥檛 crack your knuckles again for another half hour!
