Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff, Josh, Chuck. Cheerry's
Speaker 1: sitting in for day, So this is short stuff. Chuck.
Speaker 1: I have a question for you. Are you cracking your
Speaker 1: knuckles right now?
Speaker 2: I am. Did you hear that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that wasn't like a like a foldy effect.
Speaker 2: No, I was cracking my knuckles. I'm a knuckle cracker.
Speaker 2: I don't do it. I did it a lot when
Speaker 2: I was a kid, but I still do it some.
Speaker 1: This is what my knuckles sound like when I crack them.
Speaker 1: That's it the Yeah, I can't do it again because
Speaker 1: I have to wait twenty to thirty minutes for the
Speaker 1: airbus to come back and cavitate once more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll tell everybody what's going on here. What I know.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of you know, when you're young,
Speaker 2: everyone was like, it'll give you arthritis, and it's your
Speaker 2: your bones grinding together, and that's what racking your knuckles
Speaker 2: as and that can't be good for you.
Speaker 1: Yes, if your bones ground together, you would not be
Speaker 1: able to think of anything else but your bones grinding together,
Speaker 1: because you would be in so much pain that you
Speaker 1: would know your bones are grinding together. That's not what
Speaker 1: cracking your knuckles is it turns out instead, it has
Speaker 1: everything to do with the space and the area around
Speaker 1: where your bones come together. Your bones don't actually come.
Speaker 2: Together, that's right, where there's a joint that is where
Speaker 2: two bones meet, but they're separate and they're held together
Speaker 2: by ligaments and connected tissues and all that stuff. But
Speaker 2: there's also some a very other key ingredient in there.
Speaker 2: It's called synovial fluid. It's a thick, clear liquid that
Speaker 2: kind of encases that area, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's thick, it tastes just like orange crush CRUs surprisingly.
Speaker 1: And when you pop your knuckle, what you're doing is
Speaker 1: stretching or bending the ligaments and connective tissues and the
Speaker 1: cyanoval fluid there too. Right. So when you do that,
Speaker 1: that capsule is what it's called the connective tissue capsule
Speaker 1: that includes the synovial fluid. It gets stretched, which increases
Speaker 1: its volume, and then suddenly the pressure inside the capsule
Speaker 1: in that synovial fluid it goes down. It decreases in pressure,
Speaker 1: which means that all these gases that used to just
Speaker 1: be part of the solution now are part of the problem.
Speaker 1: I mean now turn into bubbles.
Speaker 2: That's right. So they become you know, they form those bubbles,
Speaker 2: and if you stretch that joint far enough, like you know,
Speaker 2: trying to crack your knuckles, the pressure in the capsule
Speaker 2: goes so low that it just pops those bubbles. And
Speaker 2: that's the popping sound that we're hearing.
Speaker 1: There, you go, not your bones rubbing together? Okay, I
Speaker 1: want you to go to recess and tell your friends
Speaker 1: that is not your bones rubbing together.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then the cavitation you mentioned earlier, I think
Speaker 2: before we break, we should just clear that up. You
Speaker 2: said twenty to thirty minutes. That is how long it
Speaker 2: takes for that gas to reach dissolve into that joint fluid,
Speaker 2: and uh, cavitation is is possible again.
Speaker 1: My knuckles?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Exactly.
Speaker 1: Oh I just did one again. Okay, I say we
Speaker 1: take a little break and come back and talk about
Speaker 1: how we know that cracking your knuckles doesn't give you arthritis.
Speaker 3: All right, we'll be right back, Chuck.
Speaker 1: I know we've talked about this guy before, doctor Donald Unger.
Speaker 1: I think we did a video about him, but he
Speaker 1: you know what, I'll bet we talked about him in
Speaker 1: the Ignoble Prize episode because he won an ignoble for this,
Speaker 1: butentually he conducted an experiment for sixty years because he
Speaker 1: wanted to prove his mother wrong. And he only cracked
Speaker 1: the knuckles and I think his left hand never cracked
Speaker 1: him on his right hand.
Speaker 2: It's crazy.
Speaker 1: And then after sixty years he finally said, okay, it's
Speaker 1: time and he x rayed his hands.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if he didn't have the compulsion to crack his knuckles,
Speaker 2: I could see how this happened. But if you are
Speaker 2: a knuckle cracker, you're kind of you feel compelled to
Speaker 2: do it. So I can't imagine what it would have
Speaker 2: taken to not crack the knuckles on one hand for
Speaker 2: that many years. It must have been really tough. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: that's my guess. So, yeah, he did this over his lifetime.
Speaker 2: He x rayed himself on the rag and eventually, decades later,
Speaker 2: came to the conclusion that he doesn't have any arthritic
Speaker 2: difference in his hands.
Speaker 1: Case closed, he had nad no arthritic difference.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: That's not to say though, that even if you don't
Speaker 1: get arthritis from cracking your knuckles. It's another thing you
Speaker 1: can tell your friends at recess, did they even have
Speaker 1: recess anymore. I guess maybe yeah, our long screen time.
Speaker 2: No, they have recess, Okay, great.
Speaker 1: There is damage that you can do from cracking your
Speaker 1: knuckles habitually. There was a guy named Raymond Broder and
Speaker 1: he examined three hundred people who crack their knuckles to
Speaker 1: look at what their joints looked like, and compared to
Speaker 1: the control group, no difference with arthritis. Again, but there
Speaker 1: was other damage like soft tissue damage to that the
Speaker 1: ligaments and the synovial fluid capsule, and that they had
Speaker 1: a decrease in grip strength. So if you crack your
Speaker 1: knuckles a lot, like don't even think about holding a
Speaker 1: glass of water with just one hand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which you know as you age, grip strength is important.
Speaker 2: So it's definitely not a harmless thing. There's some other
Speaker 2: possible side effects, something called ligament laxity, which is basically
Speaker 2: looseness over time. If you're just doing this a lot,
Speaker 2: that that's what leads to the reduced grip strength and
Speaker 2: sometimes sort of overall hand function. I think in rare cases,
Speaker 2: if you're if you have a really weird method or
Speaker 2: forceful method, or you're a little too aggressive with it,
Speaker 2: you can get some soft tissue swelling around the knuckles
Speaker 2: in the joint.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you can just straight up injure yourself. If
Speaker 1: you you can like dislocate a joint, you can injure
Speaker 1: your tendons. And even if you don't straight up injure yourself,
Speaker 1: just habitually cracking your knuckles over time, the stretching of
Speaker 1: the ligaments can it. Like you said, the grip strength
Speaker 1: thing is a is a big deal, just even without
Speaker 1: cracking your knuckles. So it also happens in pictures too,
Speaker 1: major league pictures, imagine minor league pictures too. But over
Speaker 1: the years, just throwing over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: they're stretching those ligaments suddenly violently basically, which is kind
Speaker 1: of what you're doing when you crack your knuckles. They're
Speaker 1: just doing it with different ligaments. But that is why
Speaker 1: Oral Hirsheiser's right arm just dangles uselessly at his side
Speaker 1: because it's been ruined. He ruined it pitching.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I know you're kind of kidding, but
Speaker 2: sad but true. Like, especially these days, there's been more
Speaker 2: and more instances of Tommy John surgery being required because
Speaker 2: pitchers are throwing harder and harder and if you're not,
Speaker 2: you know, able to get it near one hundred miles
Speaker 2: an hour these days, you're not gonna have much of
Speaker 2: a chance. So it's a real problem in baseball.
Speaker 1: Bring down from my joke.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just love that you love saying Earl Hirschheiser.
Speaker 1: Sure, who oughtn't say?
Speaker 2: Boy? He was great? There was a study in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety that confirmed the grip strength thing. I think they
Speaker 2: study seventy four people who regularly crack their knuckles, and
Speaker 2: their average grip strength was definitely lower, and they had
Speaker 2: more instances of hand swelling than the two hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty six people who did not crack. And another interesting
Speaker 2: thing is they found that in another study that if
Speaker 2: you're a habitual knuckle cracker, you are more likely to
Speaker 2: be a manual laborer, more likely to bite your nails
Speaker 2: as I do, smoke cigarettes which I don't, and drink
Speaker 2: alcohol which I do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know three for five.
Speaker 2: Yeah I don't manual labor so okay too, shouldn't count
Speaker 2: that one.
Speaker 1: So there is some benefits to actually cracking your knuckles though, too.
Speaker 1: We're not just hating on cracking your knuckles. There's something
Speaker 1: called the Goldie tendon organs, not the Goldie apparatus. That's
Speaker 1: a different, different episode altogether. The Goldie tenon orggans sense
Speaker 1: muscle tension, and when you crack your knuckles, you're actually
Speaker 1: relieving some muscle tension, So the muscles around the joints
Speaker 1: when you crack them get relaxed, so you can feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, your your hands feel pretty mellow after cracking
Speaker 1: your knuckles. I saw it described as yoga for your knuckles.
Speaker 2: Oh interesting, yeah, I thought so too, So like getting
Speaker 2: your back cracked or.
Speaker 1: Something basically, yeah, but for your knuckles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we found one more thing, you know, Like I'm
Speaker 2: at the age where you know, if I kneel down
Speaker 2: to get something, you're gonna hear a couple of snap
Speaker 2: crackle and a pop maybe. And then from some part
Speaker 2: of my body.
Speaker 1: Do you make an involuntary sound too when you're getting up?
Speaker 2: I do, oh oh yeah, like oh god, here we.
Speaker 1: Go, yeah, something like that, like you can't not.
Speaker 2: Do it, yeah for sure. And when I walk downstairs,
Speaker 2: my right ankle, like on every step just goes pop
Speaker 2: pop pop. So those things happen. I don't think anyone
Speaker 2: knows exactly where that comes. From theirs speculation. It could
Speaker 2: be just like you know, if it's your knee, it
Speaker 2: maybe your kneecap rubbing on the bones or something like that,
Speaker 2: or maybe a tendon sliding over a bumpy surface or
Speaker 2: something like that. So I don't think it's anything to
Speaker 2: be alarmed about.
Speaker 1: It is alarming, though, for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because it comes with age. So every new pain
Speaker 2: and sound is like, huh, that didn't happen a few years.
Speaker 1: Ago, Exactly, I should go sit down for a while, right,
Speaker 1: you got anything else for short stuff? Guy?
Speaker 2: I got nothing else. I can't crack my knuckles. So
Speaker 2: oh wait, there went one recavitated.
Speaker 1: So what does that mean?
Speaker 3: Though?
Speaker 2: I think that means short.
Speaker 3: Stuff is out.
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