My buddy swore that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis so I looked it up

He said his dad told him that 20 years ago and I found a study from 2011 that followed 200 knuckle crackers for over a decade and found no link to arthritis, so where did that myth even come from?

3 comments

3 Comments

margaret3042mo ago

That study from 2011 is actually pretty famous in the medical community. Dr. Donald Unger actually won an Ig Nobel Prize for cracking his own knuckles for 60 years to prove his mom wrong about arthritis. What I wonder is, why do parents keep passing down old wives' tales like that when there's been hard evidence against them for over a decade now? Do you think it's just a stubborn generational thing where they'd rather stick with what they heard growing up?

morgan_ramirez2mo ago

Had a buddy in high school who cracked his knuckles constantly, like a nervous habit. He's 45 now with totally normal hands, so that myth never held up for either of us.

zarar671mo ago

Oh, tell me about it! My mom told me the same thing when I was a kid, and I used to crack my knuckles just to annoy her on purpose. I'm in my 50s now and I've been cracking them all along, and my hands are just fine. I actually asked my doctor about it once during a checkup and he just laughed and said the only risk is annoying people who sit next to you.