Dr. Jeff Langmaid explains why self-cracking your back is risky: it can injure discs and ligaments without fixing the real problem, which is usually adhesions in your facet joints. Professional adjustments target the stuck joint directly, and patients who get proper care often stop self-adjusting because the restriction is actually resolved.
Should you or shouldn't you crack your own back? My name is Dr. Jeff Langman. Over the next few minutes I want to break down why you should think twice before you think about cracking your own back. You might have seen people and it might even be you doing this kind of thing day in and day out, at work, at school, at the gym, wherever else it might be. But there's a couple things you want to keep in mind when you see somebody doing that so you don't start that bad habit yourself. Number one is you could hurt yourself. If you are not a trained professional, such as a chiropractor, physical therapist or an osteopath. Manipulating your neck is not a great idea. Yes, your spine is resilient and yes, your body is strong, but you need to have the skills and you want to have the right skills if you're going to go through manipulation, especially big, high velocity manipulations that can cause injuries to your spinal discs, to the ligaments, to the facet joints. If you are moving in a way that is incorrectly, or if you have underlying pathology or challenges that you don't know about, it is highly likely that over the course of a long period of time you could struggle with or suffer an injury because of self manipulation. Now, right in line with that goes habits. Why is it not a good idea to crack your own back? This is something I have seen personally with a few friends of mine, that it becomes a habit. Think about somebody cracking their knuckles. What they started doing once a month becomes once a week, becomes once a day, and next thing you know, all day long and you might be saying, this is me, but all day long you are doing this and cracking your knuckles. And the same thing holds true with people that start doing this kind of thing for their back or this kind of thing for their neck. What might have started out very infrequently at once a month, maybe once a week, all of a sudden becomes four times, five times a day or an hour. And, and the bottom line is that sort of abject wear and tear can take its course over time. So your body does not need to be manipulated or moved around like that multiple times per day. It'd be very unlikely. And again, if you're not a professional, you would not know how to diagnose exactly where or when it should happen to begin with. The other part that you want to be concerned about if you are thinking about cracking your neck is you're probably not getting to the root of the cause of the issue. So if we have a spine model Right here, these are the bones or the vertebra in your back. In between is your spinal discs. And on the backside right here are called your facet joints. Your facet joints move, slide and glide. They allow motion. They're sort of like little knuckles on the backside of your spine. Now, what we know is the facet joints can cause or have adhesions in them. Occasionally due to injury, due to wear and tear, due to gravity, due to age, they might not be moving freely and sliding like they'd like to. Maybe think the same thing about your hands if you're getting older, you know they're not as nimble, as flexible as when you were younger. So your facet joints can have adhesions form that limits their motion. Now, this might be one of the reasons why you think you need to do this because you just feel like something's jammed or not moving right now. What we know and what the early research showcases is when you start doing these sort of manipulations, you do not have a pivot point. You think about a seesaw, there's a pivot point, and that is where all the motion occurs. My point of saying this is that when a chiropractor gets in there and provides an adjustment on a joint, he or she has a lever or a pivot point right on or at the joint that is stuck. That is what frees up that joint. But if you're doing long lever type moves like that, one of the things that we've seen in some of the research is you might get pops, you might get crunches, you might get areas around the adhesive joint moving and you hear it, but you don't because you don't have the lever. You are not being able to get in there specifically on the joint that's stuck. You're not getting it unstuck, you're not releasing the adhesions on the joint that's causing you to want to do this. Well, guess what happens? You're going to go back and try to do it again. So these become an avalanche of bad habits. If you feel like something's stuck, you get some cracks and pops. It feels better for five minutes, but you feel like it's still stuck. You get back in there, you do the same thing. Now you're starting to develop a habit. You're not taking care of, of the issue that is kind of stimulating your brain to want to do it because you're not releasing the joint that's stuck. And the third part about it is you're increasing your likelihood for injury by getting in there and trying to adjust yourself. So my best answer to you is if you feel like you need to self adjust all the time, if you feel like you need to do this, that might be your body telling you that you have a joint that's not moving correctly. And and I'd encourage you to head out to a chiropractor near you, go through a proper assessment, ensure that you are getting the right adjustment at the right time, in the right place and who knows? I have seen patients in my practice when I ask them about whether they self adjusted and they said yes, after they started receiving care, they started doing it less. Why? Because the reason they wanted to do this was gone. The issue was taken care of, the joints were moving appropriately. That reduced their likelihood of injury. It got the joint moving properly and it took away the bad habit. So should you crack your own back, it's very unlikely that you'll seriously injure yourself, although that's a small chance. But more than anything else, if you have that itching, head over to a chiropractor near you, have them do a proper evaluation and get the problem taken care of properly. My name is Dr. Jeff Langmaid. Subscribe to this channel if you want to learn more about health and well being. Be sure to stay tuned to the next video. It's coming up right now. Hey, what's going on? If you loved that video, be sure to subscribe to this channel. The evidence based chiropractor puts out videos all the time at the intersection of marketing and research, showing you how to grow your practice while also growing your knowledge base. So if you liked it, be sure to comment down below or hit subscribe and I'll see you in the next video.
