Whether it triggers a sense of satisfaction or sends shivers down your spine, cracking knuckles is a widespread and controversial habit across the general public, and yet we’ve all grown up with our parents telling us that it’s bad for us, despite scientists debunking this myth, why is that?
Before understanding whether cracking your knuckles is bad for you, let’s get into the nitty gritty details of knuckle cracking. Knuckles are an example of a synovial joint, also known as the highly mobile joints found in your body, without these joints, we wouldn’t be able to wiggle our fingers in funny directions, and more importantly, we wouldn’t be able to pop our knuckles. This joint is surrounded in a tissue called the synovial membrane that can produce, believe it or not, Synovial fluid. This fluid has a similar consistency to egg whites, thus making it lubricative and limiting friction between the two bones in a joint. Other than its consistency, the fluid also has a key role in containing dissolved gases, more specifically, hydrogen, carbon dioxide nitrogen, and oxygen.
When you start to push or pull on your knuckles, you’re actually changing the size of the space between your joints and allowing the volume within the joints to increase, simultaneously decreasing the pressure in the space. This is called cavitation and allows the dissolved gases to rapidly form bubbles.
You would think that the bursting of these bubbles is what creates the clicking sound when you pull at your knuckles, but it turns out that it’s the formation of the bubbles. Of course, some bubbles do burst during the knuckle popping extravaganza but most of them burst 15 to 20 minutes after, hence why it takes 15 to 20 minutes to be able to crack your knuckles again.
But is it actually bad for you? And the answer to this epic saga of a question is: no. Well, there’s no actual research that says that popping joints is bad for you and a study was even conducted in 2015 called Kawchuk et al that looked at this phenomenon using MRIs. Nonetheless, the position that you put your joints in in order to achieve that pop could be harmful as your pulling at ligaments and muscles, and not gonna lie, but the way that some people pop their joints looks kinda painful, which is probably why your parents flinch every time you pop a joint…
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