Is Cracking Your Own Neck Dangerous?

Most people have cracked their own neck at some point — but is it safe? In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explains why self-manipulation offers only temporary relief and how repeated neck cracking can overstretch ligaments, create instability, and actually make the problem worse. Learn the difference between a spinal “pop” and a real chiropractic adjustment, plus when you should get evaluated.

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask The Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. Hello, welcome to another episode. So there's a question that I see a lot online. There's a question I get asked at parties and social events a lot, and patients commit a lot of times, and they say things to me that I know this is a situation. So I want to address this today on this episode of Ask the Chiropractor is cracking your own neck dangerous? A lot of people feel like they can just grab their head and neck and turn it and get a lot of popping noises, and they think they're doing what I do. Number one, you're not doing that at all. No more than me. Brushing my teeth is the same thing as a hygienist getting in there. Actually, it's worse than that. I don't even like that example. It is just wrong. Cracking your own neck is just wrong. Let's talk about it. You turn your head to the side and the side, you hear a noise and what that noise is called a cavitation. When you have a joint and it's under pressure, fluids build up and it creates actual pressure. When you release fluid under pressure, there's an audible noise or a cracking noise or a popping sound. The same thing's true for a can of soda. If you get a can of soda and you open it up and you hear a loud pop, so when you open the can pop, then you know your cold beverage is ready to drink. So that's the same physics, the same idea. Of cavitation, another example that we're really familiar with. So people think they can turn their head far enough to make a joint, make that noise, and they feel they've done What I do what I do is called a chiropractic adjustment, and a chiropractic adjustment is very specific to an actual vertebrae. When done correctly, what we'll do is we'll take x-rays of your spine, we'll go through and fill your spine. We'll do what we call motion palpation, where we use our fingertips to feel how the musculature is moving or not moving around vertebrae. And then we'll look at your clinical findings and your history, and we'll combine all those together to come up with a chiropractic adjustment that we're gonna make in a specific vertebrae. And when we do that specific movement, we have this exact angle. We're gonna put our elbow, our wrist, our hand, everything at the right angle, and the line of drive is gonna be in a certain plane to match that level on the vertebrae. We showed up on the top, we straight across. By the time we get down to C seven, our elbows all the way down.'cause the neck has a curve to it and the joints have different angles as you go down. What I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to impress you. The amount of work and research and science that goes into the different levels, we adjust it is not what they make it look like on social media. And it is definitely not just grabbing someone's head and turning and twisting it really quick. It is more than all those things. But people tell me, Hey, when I crack my own neck, it feels good. So why do you think it's different than what I do? Why I often bring up things like liquor. When you drink it, it feels pretty good. Does that mean it's good for you? Was stucco an ice cream sundae? I've never had an ice cream sundae, didn't feel good while I was eating it, but I've never had a ice cream sundae that I knew was good for me. The fact that it feels good doesn't mean it's good for. You, there's a little bit of an endorphin release when you hear this noise. But really what's happening is you're not moving the one that's giving you the problem, the one that gets stiff and tight, you're not releasing it. By doing that, you're making the ones above and below move beyond their normal range of motion to compensate for the one that's stuck. So if you're fifth and sixth, bone in your neck are stuck. The fourth and the seventh will move extra to make up the difference, especially if you force it to make a noise. So you take it to the point of past that normally wants to go and you give a little ump yourself, and what happens is the five and six feel that they're already under stress. They feel that stress and they get more stressed, more locked up. The ones above and below now become more el lucid and overstretched and over. The ligaments get stretched so much from you doing that. And the fact that they're trying to make up the difference for the one that's already stuck, that when you come to see me, I can turn your head really far. You tell 'em it hurts. I know what you're doing. I know that you're propagate yourself. I'll tell you to knock it off because you're not doing yourself any favor. If you're making my job harder, you're making the amount of time it takes to get your neck better, take longer. It, everything's prolonged and more aggressive and takes more of everything when you do that. So you think you're saving your time and energy and money by doing it yourself, but you're actually making it a lot worse. Not only that, but now we have these ligaments that are moving extra and then you're stretching it more. These ligaments become lax, they become not tight. They become loose. And now we have instability in the area above and below a problem spot to start with. So the C five and C six are already fixated and subluxated. But that's what chiropractors call it. Two or more of your bones are misaligned, creating stress subluxated. So these two are subluxated. Now you got the ones above and below. Now you're overstretching 'em, overusing them, stretching the ligaments and tendons out, making them unstable. Now you just create a whole nother issue, another problem along with the other issue. So you had one issue, now you've got multiple issues of instability. And again, you're not moving the right joint, you're moving the wrong joint. That's the biggest problem. So maybe you didn't have a C four C3 problem before this. But now you're getting there to have a problem because of the way you're doing this. So again, how do I know I'm getting the right one? You're getting the wrong one. One yours is super loose. Mine's really tight. The one I'm trying to fix. So I, and I feel that really loose and I feel that really tight. I can tell what's happening and again, how do I know it? Again, our exam findings our imaging findings, we use all these tools to find this and all these years of college. I wish it was just this and this, and I'm done. I didn't have to do all those years at college. But, we go to school longer than medical doctors doing the classroom to learn to become, get our doctoral. Degree and we spend more time in the clinical setting than they do too. You can look that up if you want. And the education's a little different, so we're not comparing apples to apples, but there is, we spend a lot of time in the classroom, so that's how we find the Pacific one that make sure we get the right vertebrae each time. And if you're getting this to happen all the time, you get this noise and you're getting this relief and you just becomes like a habit. You're doing so much. I hate to break it to you, but your neck's really bad. You got a lot of issues going on in your neck, and this is like a red flag that you need to get under care, that you need to go find your chiropractor. You need to start getting adjusted.'cause doing this is not gonna make it better. You're going to continue to make it worse and bigger. Matter of fact, I had a young man come in this office in his teenage years and he was already dealing with the degenerative disc disease where the disc is dehydrating and going away.'cause he liked to do this all the time to gross on his sister. He thought it was funny to gross his sister out. So he would do it and she'd scream at him, but he grinding those two that were stuck at this, kept getting more and more stuck. You see when you walk and you move, the vertebras move and they twist and they move with you, and they go all different directions and the muscles are firing, they're doing their thing, and they're pushing the nutrients into the joint space where the disc is and pulling the toxins out. But if you're subluxated, they're not moving. And you get the ones above and below to move extra, and now these ones get more and more locked up. You're accelerating the degenerative processes that happen that age and degenerate a spine. By allowing those to get more stuck and more fixated, that disc is never gonna get the nutrients it needs and instead it. Worse, it's not gonna get the toxins out. So when the toxins don't come out of the joint space, then it becomes more and more hyper inflammatory and you get more and more stiff necks and more and more problems. And it takes longer and longer for me to help you get better, get back to where you were. So if every time you turned your head and you're getting these crack and this and that, those are bad things now. The hardest thing I tell people is now you have to get outta that habit. You did that all the time. Now you need to stop doing it. So it's a hard habit to break too, just because we get nervous, we don't know to do their hands and we do stuff like that. And then, so this is something that people tell me they do all the time. Now, they might not tell me they sleep on a special pillow. They might do things like that. And there's a lot of things that I tell patients that are good for you to do. When you have a good back in order to keep a good back, people say, Dr. HBUs, what's your impression of an aversion table? One aversion tables keeps the healthy spine healthy, but doesn't make an unhealthy spine healthy. The stretching and the exercising keeps the healthy spine healthy, but doesn't make an unhealthy spine healthy. So these people think they're treking their own neck. You're making that's an unhealthy thing to do to an unhealthy spine, and you're making it more unhealthy. So there's things that you're doing that you think are helping your neck or that you're doing to make your neck better. Make sure you discuss that with your chiropractor. I only ask my chiropractor we're the ones that specialize in reversing the degenerative changes.'cause I tell you what, if you have two vertebras that are stuck and they're not moving properly, a traction unit and all that stuff, none one's gonna break there. A that motion back with a chiropractic adjustment, no pt no. Massage therapists. Those are all good things to help us all. To progress to get better faster. Don't get me wrong, those are valid good things, but only the chiropractors uniquely trained to go in there and find that specific ver brain do that chiropractic adjustments. So it's very important you go to a chiropractor for this. Now you can ask those people whether or not that's a good idea to go see a chiropractor, but you're asking somebody with no chiropractic education. They don't even really know what we do. And you're gonna ask them whether we should go or not. It's kinda asking your optometrists about your wisdom teeth. They know the eyes, they don't know the wisdom teeth. I'd ask my dentist about my wisdom teeth. I'd ask my optometrist about my eyes. And when it comes to chiropractic care and chiropractic adjustments, I would ask a chiropractor, so is it dangerous? Is it, can you really hurt yourself? Longer term you can. And yes, you can sprain something by trying to do it. There's been no research or data that shows that this tears the arteries inside your neck. That's an old myth that was spread by our profession from the people that have tried to oppose our profession for many decades. There's been no research that shows that it actually happens. There's been research that shows it. People have a artery that's compromised and then they do more stuff too to make it worse. But there's never been any data or research that shows you can actually tear an artery. So if you're wondering if that will, give you a stroke or something like that, if you're already having one that's already issued there, it'll make it worse, but it won't create the problem. It'll just make the problem worse. So again. Talk about great reasons to go see a chiropractor, to make sure you're safe doing this properly. Take a look at those disc spaces, make sure you're not causing permanent damage for the rest of your life. And again, just because it feels good, it doesn't mean it's good for you. The if you feel the need to crack your neck all the time, that's usually assigned, that something isn't moving correctly, and it's time to have a professional personal look at it and tell you what it is. And that's a chiropractor. The longer you wait, the more symptoms you're gonna get, the more degeneration you're gonna get, and the harder it's gonna be to correct this. If you're doing this all the time I can't stress enough how much a chiropractic evaluation would be. Now, if you've had your x-rays taken at your primary doctor's office or an orthopedic doctor's office, bring 'em with you. The x-ray reviews are the x-ray reviews. They don't change who takes 'em. Bring 'em with you. Don't bring the report. A lot of people bring the paper report. I don't care about the paper report that's had nothing on there about chiropractic analyzation because again, only a chiropractor could analyze an x-ray the way a chiropractor needs to see it. I don't care what the anybody else says. We get those all the time. People bring us the paper report, not the actual images. Their radiologist is not a chiropractor. They don't know what chiropractors do, and the doctor's not a chiropractor, they don't know what we do either bring the actual images and the chiropractor can evaluate those. Alright, I hope I answered that question. Every once in a while I have to talk about this and put this back to rest. So it's cracking your own neck. Dangerous long term. Yes. Short term. It could be. And if you got bigger under things going, underlying things happening. But again, that chiropractor is uniquely trained to help you with this. Thanks for tuning in.