As children, you may have been terrorized by being told to stop cracking your fingers or risk developing osteoarthritis as you got older. But what really happens when we crack our joints? This is the “not stupid question” answered the evening edition in his podcast.
When you were young, you may have been terrified by being told to stop cracking your fingers or you would get osteoarthritis as you got older. So is this an urban legend or is it true? And where does this cracking noise come from?
Where does this “crack” come from?
In fact, according to researchers in the scientific journal Scientific Reportsthe noise comes from microscopic bubbles bursting between your joints.
Between them, there is a small liquid, called “synovial fluid”. It provides a lubricating role between the bones. And if you twist your fingers, or pull on them, the spacing means that there is no longer enough liquid between the two. A small air bubble is therefore created there. When released, it bursts. The hypothesis of the noise of these bubbles is not new. This is even an observation that scientists have made since the 1970s. In 2015, others concluded that the noise came from the formation of this bubble. Since then, researchers from Polytechnique de Stanford and Paris, by creating a mathematical model with modeling, have deduced that the noise came from the bursting of the gas bubble and not from its formation, and that a single bubble of gas was enough to cause this noise.
No osteoarthritis involved
To find out whether or not this gesture is dangerous, an American doctor had fun cracking the fingers of one of his hands for fifty years. He noticed no signs of osteoarthritis or arthritis and even won the Ig-Nobel Prize, a parody of the Nobel Prize awarded to ten scientists each year, for funny and original research.
Other doctors, however, qualify by reminding that repeating the gesture, in particular by cracking the neck or back, can be bad in the long term, in the event of “bad handling” in particular.
Finally, if you want to stop annoying your colleagues, you can try to get rid of this habit!
