I sometimes jolt my neck with my arms to relieve stiffness and tension. This always works, but I always wonder - If I apply enough force can I deliberately break my own neck?
Or, more to the point. Are there any documented cases of people having done this?
No cite, but ISTR reading a news story about such a death a number of years ago. I’m not sure if “breaking the neck” would be the best description, but the guy twisted his head to crack his neck and managed to damage either his spinal cord or some blood vessel enough to cause death. I suspect it’s one of those things akin to dying by being hit in the chest with a hockey puck–insanely improbable, but it happens every so often.
I crack my neck by just whipping it around so that I’m looking over one of my shoulders, not using my hands at all. I sometimes wonder if I whipped it around as fast and as hard as I could, whether I could break my neck. The problem, of course, is that its the sort of experiment where the risk of a positve result probably isn’t worth satisfying my curiousity.
Still, if I ever want to do myself in, I’ll give it a try.
Eep, I do this constantly. My neck cracks loud, violently, and often. My best friend is always telling me that it’s going to be “the big crack” one of these days. ::crosses fingers::
Tried it. Doesn’t work. Hurts though.
From this site on hanging techniques, ancient and modern:
So it would seem you need to provide roughly 1000 pounds of pressure to break your own neck. I have no idea how fast a crick that would take. I leave this to the math and physics majors.
My mom told me once about a time when my great-grandpa was young, when he had a job putting lumber on trucks. Apparently one time he was carrying a very heavy load and someone called his name. He turned his head quickly to see who it was and he heard a crack, followed by extreme neck pain. When he tried to turn his head back he couldn’t. He obviously knew something was wrong so he went to the hospital, where x-rays revealed that he had broken his neck. Surgery corrected it and he was fine, although the doctor said that if he had tried to forcibly turn his neck back into place he would either have been paralysed or dead. The diagnosis was a stress fracture caused by the strain of the load he was carrying plus the sudden jerk of his head.
Nit-pick: It takes 1000 ft-lbf to reliably produce a classic “hangman’s fracture.” That doesn’t mean that some necks cannot be broken by lesser force, or in less ‘classic’ a fashion - It only defines a professional standard intended to work every single time.