Ah, yes… anyone else had an osteopath lay you on your side, grab you in a sideways bear hug (that wraps up your arms and twists your legs over and under each other), and then bend you over his knee (the one that isn’t between your shoulder blades at this point)?
Some of them call it The Kirksville Crunch (esp. the ones who’ve graduated from NE Missouri State in Kirksville, MO).
It is aptly named.
I crack a lot of my bones…my wrists (when my cts is acting up or I’m bored…hrm…maybe thats why…n/m), my ankles, my back, my feet and toes, along with my hands (not just the fingers) and find it helps keep me limber. I’m not the most flexible but if I don’t I feel really tense and nauseated. It also helps with a lot of my pinched nerves. I have been cracking my joints/bones forever, at lest 10 years. I think you’ll be fine. 
Oh and someone said it sounds like you might have a bit of OCD: I believe I do but not to disrupt my life. As of yet. lol
I was kinda’ hoping someone with the same symtoms would post, now at least I can stop holding my breath…too late, died from asphyxiation. 
You may have me beat by a year, sir, but I’ll raise you hip. We still don’t know what the long term effects are though, I’d like to hear from someone who’s been at back cracking for 50 years, but I’ll take a fellow Man at Arms and be very happy (pun intended). You’re probably right, and everything’s fine, at least I feel fine. There may be some OCD tendencies, but usually people with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder…are very obsessive about it, and slowly everything around them is dragged into it…like Mr. Monk…
Good to know I could help you a little, BT. Oh and I’m female.
Sorry 'bout that, VitrolicBump, so hard to tell on these forums you know, I guess I shouldn’t presume so much. This is an interesting development though, you’re the first female to have similar issues that I’ve corresponded with TMK (maybe the reason for my presumption).
It’s ok BT; the name veils me in mystery. And yes, most of the time it’s men that crack their fingers or seem to in public. I’m someone who thinks of things as mostly fair game. Plus, I tend to think on both sides of the fence, though mostly femalish.
If only more people were like you (sigh). It’s not that I’m gay or even close to it (not a shrimp either FYI ;)), but it annoys even me when men (or women) are totally stereotypical, all they can do is watch football and NASCAR, drink Bud Light, and all around be obnoxious, and if I asked them to spell obnoxious, it would start with an ‘a’ :smack:. Thanx for understanding the mistake, VB :).
I’m 48 and while I am not as noisy as you are (you regularly crack your jaw? mine pops occasionally after a big chew ;)), but I definitely pop from my neck to my toes, deeply and regularly, 2 - 3 times a day. No ill effects that I am aware of; quite the opposite.
Now - one thing I do that I have not seen mentioned: yoga. 3x a week; Bikram, the hot kind. My observation is this: when my joints pop within the context of a normal range of motion, or going deeply into a yoga form with proper technique, life is good. When I try to pop them via a wrenching motion or by forcing anything, I am at greater risk to feel pain during or after the pop. Sounds kinda “duh” but there ya go. As I have stuck with yoga, my form has improved and my postures have deepened - there is nothing cooler than getting a deep, structural “pop!” as a testament to getting a pose nailed cold - something deep in my hip or down between my shoulder blades; the really inaccessible stuff. Ahhhh.
I also use a chiropracter, as needed - with my regular yoga habit, I have gone down from 6 - 8 times a year to maybe 2 - 3…but there’s nothing better than my “Man Spa Day”: 90 minutes of Bikram yoga, then a 90 minutes massage, then a chiro adjustment. Ahhhhh.
There we go, now we’re getting somewhere, thanks WordMan. I can see that yoga would be good, I’ll keep that in mind, but at the moment the pops don’t hurt, quite the opposite, and that’s what I’m worried about (usually something that feels good isn’t always good for you IME ;)). It is good to know that it’s not as dangerous as I thought it would be. When did you start exactly? I was 14/15 and discovered I could pop a few joints here and there, and slowly over the years the number of joints I was popping increased, always by accident the first time, and then that joint would start hurting a few days later and I’d have to pop it again, thus adding it to the every increasing number of them I had to do it to. I don’t see how I could ever find another joint to pop, seeing as how now I can pop all of them :).
Heck, I don’t know when I started; certainly as a kid.
Everything you’re saying makes sense - if you are going through normal range-of-motion maneuvers and eliciting pops, cool. All I am saying is: don’t force it, and if you really want to pop stuff you didn’t even know you had 
try yoga for a few years. Your body sounds well-suited to yoga, and you really have no idea what it can do for you. Good stuff, well past the satisfying pops I get from it.
That’s a great line, you should make that your signature. Advice well taken, generally I don’t force it too much, but will sometimes if I really got a ‘crick in the neck’ so to speak 
, usually just a stretch or something does it though for most of my joints.
I crack regularly, but just a few joints. Particularly, when I go to bed, it’s like I can’t sleep until I’ve stretched and popped a few times. All the tension of the day leaving, my husband refers to me as his very own percussion section. 
HAHAHhahahahaha…you all are gonna’ ‘crack’ me up…
Um…sex anyone? lol
And yoga will get at certain joints that even popping your back or your hip won’t get. Plus it releases tension by relaxing you. I also get the pain if I don’t pop it, and an urgency that if I don’t do it right now I’ll die. And when I do…ahhhhh, relief. Day is complete.
Spicy, VB, now we just need to take yoga-sex classes and get it all out of the system at once! :eek: 
That is what kamasutra is for BT. Hehe
Oh, I’m starting to understand that book, even way back then they had the same problem…makes since now…
Had what problem? And I just find a lot of the positions are the same. It’s really about doing it and enjoying the sex immensely through certain positions. Eh, I do that enough on my own when I can (very rare…). 
Just a poor extension of the joke…:). I think all that was really going on was they liked drawing erotic pictures…Bwahahaha…I’ve never read the book, and know very little about it except it has some wild, and maybe even strange :dubious:, positions…is this thread turning into a more clandestine version of the other one that is about sex?
Lol, um, maybe. I tend to hijack threads because my brain works all over, mostly in the gutter.