Ever since I was a kid, I’ve cracked my knuckles. I don’t want to do it, but it’s compulsive – the release of the pressure pent up in my fingers. And so, despite years of resolutions, promises to myself and systems of reward and punishment, I continue. I know that eventually, I will end up with terrible arthritis.
But wait – it turns out I won’t. Just the other day, I discovered that a doctor won the Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2009 for doing the research that broke the long-held link between knuckle-cracking and arthritis. He cracked the knuckles on one hand for 60 years, to find out if he would develop arthritis (he didn’t).
This story is from the July/August 2022 edition of Very Interesting.
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This story is from the July/August 2022 edition of Very Interesting.
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