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Posted by tchalla 1 day ago

Should you stop cracking your knuckles?(www.bbc.com)
114 points | 121 commentspage 3
throwaway314155 21 hours ago||
Over my dead body.
firebot 22 hours ago||
Highly agree with the article. If you don't have neck issues, don't pop that shit. Especially by twisting. Pulling sideways left or right, you're probably fine. Palm to chin and the other hand twisting the neck? Risky!
ButlerianJihad 19 hours ago||
Cracking one's knuckles has been a thing that men do, that is: only a minority of women would be engaging in this, but men would pick it up in groups and it would become a custom. And of course, boys at a younger age would emulate the elder men, and so you had boys cracking their knuckles, and doing it at home, in front of their sisters and their mothers, and doing it in school in front of their teachers. And it is a blue-collar activity; something considered uncouth for the genteel knowledge-worker to do, except if you're acting in solidarity with the manual laborer, and you crack your knuckles as you sit down at the keyboard to type.

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.

KayEss 5 hours ago|
[dead]
abstractspoon 1 day ago||
Betteridge says?
dgritsko 1 day ago||
TL,DR: No, unless you're doing it so hard that you're straining your joints. But don't crack your neck.
ranger_danger 1 day ago||
> don't crack your neck

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.

s1artibartfast 1 day ago||
Yeah, and with the q-tips, it seems trival to do it safely. For some reason, be aware or careful always gets compressed to avoidance
lokar 1 day ago|||
YouTube has some pretty awful videos of ear canals full of cotton fibers. Touching the eardrum is not the only risk.
genewitch 14 hours ago|||
i've been cleaning the insides of my ears since before my mom said "nothing smaller than your elbow in your ears" and "nothing smaller than a fencepost;" and my PCP looks in my ears 4+ times a year and has never said anything - either way, do or don't or gross or nice.
AngryData 1 day ago||||
I mean it is pretty easy to find all sorts of people misusing or poorly using common hygiene products. Everyone I know uses q-tip in their ears and none have ever had a problem with it. To me it would be like not using toilet paper because some people aren't smart enough to not scour their ass raw.
sublinear 1 day ago|||
And you think YouTube represents the average user of q-tips?

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.

alt227 1 day ago||||
There is never any reason to put q-tips in your ear. Ear drops are infinitely better.
georgemcbay 1 day ago|||
> For some reason, be aware or careful always gets compressed to avoidance

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".

MiroslavPokorny 1 day ago|
Really BBC ?