It’s a question the many of us have thought about and is an age old question. Does cracking your neck, back or knuckles cause arthritis? Dr Daniel Irvine from Irvine Chiropractic tell us the truth!
Here is the transcript from the video:
Welcome back to another addition of the Wellness channel here at Relax For Life, I͛m Dr Daniel Irvine. Local chiropractor here at Peakhurst, Mortdale and at Parramatta. Todays video is about the question I get very often at work is about is cracking my next bad for me, it͛s an age-old question. Cracking the knuckles, will it give me arthritis? The answer is yes, it will. But there͛s a lot to be said within that. If you are the type of person who gets a sore neck, tight shoulders and you feel like you need to crack your neck, are you going to get arthritis from that? The answer is probably, eventually yes but everyone is going to get arthritis one day as eventually our joints are going to wear and tear. Will you speed up the process by cracking it more often, the answer is yes. So, what happens there we have these beautifully designed neck joints? When they get tight and stiff we need to work on them with a chiropractor or a physio to loosen the joints that are stuck. If we go and self-manipulate and crink and crack our necks ourselves what will happen is that the joints that are already moving a lot will move more. Our brain will get the message to relax and we will lose that feeling of tension for a while, it may last a day or two. But eventually that interim time will get shorter and shorter and sooner or later you are going to want to crack your back every hour or two. When you start to do that more than a couple of times a day, those joints that are already loose are getting looser and looser and the joints that are stiff will get stiffer and stiffer. The loose joints will start to undergo a process where they become too lax, when they are too lax the muscles around them tighten we get more stiffness. When that starts to happen, the joints are too loose, the body is smart enough to say, we don͛t want too much movement here as we don͛t want to dislocate our neck͛.
So, the joints undergo a process of degeneration where they start tolay down bones to protect themselves. This takes years and years of self-manipulating but the general situation we call arthritis is when the bones are degenerated. These beautiful arcs here (in the neck) and these centralised joints here (lower) sit on our discs and we become prone to arthritis. So, the short answer is yes, the long answer is what I have just given you there. So, if you are a person that cracks your neck, please stop. Please go and see your local chiro or physio for a manipulation or an adjustment. Or some advice on posture or some advice on soft tissue work, whatever you need you have, they will sort that our for you. But the answer is not cracking your own neck. Hope you heed this advice and see you on the next edition.