Posted by tchalla 1 day ago
So the cracking of knuckles annoys people who don't do it, and it annoys women, and it annoys people in authority over young boys. So you want them to stop, and you want to regulate men's bodies and control what we do with our bodies. But you cannot tell us all the time "because I said so" or God forbid, "because it annoys me", because that can eventually achieve the opposite result.
So the medical myth of developing arthrosis and hurting your bones and damaging your joints, those were "old wives' tales" and "white lies" that were told in order to scare boys into stopping the activity. And perhaps even to scare husbands and employees into stopping. They tell men to stop spitting on the floor, to stop picking their nails with a pocket knife, and usually a medical excuse arises, because this is a higher authority that will terminate any individual choice or discretion in the way we treat our bodies.
The article makes a point to mention specifically that excessive/forceful neck cracking can be dangerous, but then switches to just "Cracking your own neck is not recommended"... but to me it sounds like they're referring more to the forceful kind, such as the manipulations on youtube they reference.
I suppose it's like asking people to stop using q-tips... they're probably not going to, and the amount of people accidentally injured from either seems to be quite low.
Even when YouTube has videos uploaded by doctors having to put up with this kind of stupidity, it doesn't change the fact that hardly anyone does that. The vast majority of stuff uploaded to YouTube isn't even that. It's losers trying to get views.
The reason is legal liability, generally.
If you sell Q-Tips and tell people to be careful when sticking them in their ears you're likely to be held legally liable when someone isn't careful because there will be infinite wiggle room for them to claim you didn't specify the safe use clearly enough.
If you sell Q-Tips and tell people not to put them in their ear (even though you know that's why most people are buying them) then when someone sues you for messing up their ear you can tap the words on the box and say "well, we told you not to do that".