Posts made by JointCracker

@conscentity

Thank you, glad my expensive recovery is appreciated! It will take a short while for all the search bots to find us again for listing.

I am very sorry for the outage we had since last December, jointcrackers.com fell victim to domain name scalping.

Unfortunately, in 2006 I had picked a very unreliable domain registrar who I once extended for 5 and once for 9 years. The registrar reminded me after 5 years to renew but "forgot" to mention to me my 9 year contract was about to expire on 11/23/2020. After this long time, I forgot about it myself and before I could react, a domain scalper snapped up the domain name.

It took a while to track down the new owner and re-acquire the domain name for an inflated price.

Even though the ad revenue is not even paying for the server costs, I was willing to pay for my mistakes, I did not want to keep you guys and gals standing in the rain without any goodbyes.

Obviously, I will make sure this does not happen ever again.

I am truly sorry.

Important: If you notice loading issues or the site appears broken, please disable adblockers which I have noticed can cause issues with the new code. Also please do support this site by not running such services.

Over the last 15 years since launching this community, I have spend many thousands of dollars in resources to keep us up to date and online.

As announced in September 2019, now is the time to try to recoup at least fixed cost of running this site.

After a lot of preparation, we have finally been approved for Google AdSense, thank you Google!

Instead of manually placing ad spots myself, I have decided to let Google do the optimizations and placement automatically, which I find to be much less obtrusive than if done manually and fixed.

If you are a fellow joint cracker, I hope you do find this new sustainable setup agreeable moving forward. Thank you for your understanding.

If you are a medical professional and do have a product you would like to advertise at this site, now you have a proper channel to do so.

I have just dropped a number of users who abused the "about me" and "signature" fields in their profile for spam. Pretty much all of these users logged in only once after registering and did have zero posts.
Should I have deleted your account in error and you were a misunderstood legitmate joinctracker who just loves casinos and stuff, please do re-register and start posting. We would love to hear your story!

At the same time I have disabled "signatures" and "about me" descriptions. If you want to introduce yourself, please post in introductions.

I just moved us to a new server with same virtual hardware spec and hoster but reduced cost whilst upgrading all major software components for better stability.
The upgrades were long overdue, I am sorry for not doing this earlier. An upgrade a year or so ago failed partly and left this forum in a weird state which led to some unneccessary instability. Stability should now be much better.

Moving forward, due to budget and time constraints, unfortunately I need to look into ways to recoup cost of maintaining and running this site. One approach is to enable Google AdSense. For this I will need to clean up some curse words, we should do this anyway. Another approach would be to ask you for regular donations via e.g. Patreon. Feel free to post in the feedback category to discuss this if you have any concerns or ideas.

Sorry for the expired SSL certification warnings, fixed now.

I promised to update this thread when I have done more experimenting with supplements. Better late than never.

For now almost 3 years, I have daily taken 2 x 1000mg pure MSM and 3 x 500mg green-lipped mussel capsules. I took care to choose a brand on the green-lipped capsules which has very little iodine so the regular iodine intake would be irrelevant.

Well, what can I say. MSM clearly had a positive effect on my skin, so I kept taking MSM. I believe the green-lipped mussels do help my joints in a way that I can quicker recoup from a bad joint cracking day.

Both supplements are very affordable and do more good than harm so I kept taking them till this day.

@MasterCracker said:

Rebuild the joints ligaments? Unnatural Hypermobility?
Your saying: be less mobile w the joint so the ligament becomes LESS flexible and more stiff.
That would seem counter productive and a recipe for injury:

when a stiff or tight ligament is pushed past its normal ROM it will sprain and inflame and Hurt.

Increased ROM/mobility is a good thing.

Hyperflexability is a good thing
Joints can be hyperflexible and strong
STRONGER even
Not mobilizing joints will make them weak and tight and injury prone.

The video is indeed interesting. However, I do not agree this level of hypermobility is healthy.

I did not mean that you should aim for stiff joints, which is clearly unhealthy, too. "Hypermobility" by its very name implies the mobility is "above" normal. I would thus personally aim for "normal" mobility.
Last time I checked hypermobile joints are not healthy, also see What Are Hypermobile Joints?

@Locker165 said:

I'm the same. I can barely get my knuckles to crack nowadays. Shame.

Interesting, I wonder how this can be explained. Does the desire to crack the joint also pass with the ability to crack it? Or do you still feel the discomfort and are now unable to release it? I assume the ability to crack your knuckles has decreased slowly over time because you also reduced the amount of cracking you did? I can't imagine losing the ability to click a joint as long as you keep up doing it?
This comes back down to question, can you unlearn cracking a joint or learn a new joint to crack? Or are you either a joint popper or you are not due to genetical dispostion / hypermobility in your joints?

So either congratulations on successful unlearning are on order, or if you really want to crack your knuckles again, you should be able to relearn it.

Finally, the relaunch is here!

Here is what you need to know as a returning fellow joint cracker:

• Please do request a new password by entering your email in Forgot Password?
• All accounts with zero posts have been dropped. If you have been dropped, please register again!
• We are finally mobile friendly
• All topics, posts and signatures are migrated
• All private messages are migrated into the chat system
• All old polls are turned into images, new polls do not work just yet
• Posts are now written in Markdown syntax instead of BBCode
• Avatars were not migrated. If you like, please do upload a new 128x128 profile image in your profile settings
• SPAM protection is much more modern
• We are now using SSL encryption for better privacy and security
• Much better SEO properties. The old phpbb software created tons of duplicate links which will take a while for the search engine crawlers to unlearn
• In any case let me know what you think! What is great, what is bad, what do you miss?

On our old site we had a number of polls, here are all the results, newest first. Poll could not be migrated so the old polls are now screenshots:

!

Quick update:
Data migration was finally successful today. I now "only" need to configure the new software and install it on our new host.
If all goes really well, the relaunch might happen as early as this weekend.

Please refrain from posting until we have relaunched, or your post will likely be lost.

Hard to believe, this January we are celebrating our 10th anniversary!

Over the holiday season, I have investigated our upgrade options to move forward. I have finally settled on a very new and exciting platform!

Thank you for participating in the polls. I heard you!

I have shuffled a few things around to ease migration to this upcoming, much more modern bulletin board system.

The critical migration blockers are already out of the way. There are of course still a number of todos, which will probably take a few weeks. I will work on this as time permits.

Due to tragic circumstances our old hoster was closing shop. RIP Gurpreet Virdi!
We are now running on our new host, which has better production PHP settings, so our legacy site can again run smoothly for a while longer. I am now finally starting work on a relaunch on a modern CMS platform.

Stay tuned!

@Elle:

I have the same issue for years now..primarily on the right side, but it will also migrate to the left side..but when it does the urge OTC rack on the right side disappears. So the constant and increasingly maddening urge to crack only happens on one side at a time. I might only have a day of relief but then the whole things starts up again out of nowhere. There are people who post here who seem to enjoy the sensation. I find it depressing and disruptive, and frustrating that I haven't been able to find any answers to this. I am healty, have been tested for lupus, rheumatoid, and lymes…I had lymes over 15 years ago, and was treated..so I don't know if this is connected somehow. I tested negative for the other conditions. I think I eat healthy, but now am looking into supplements. Glucosamine produced no results for me. I exercise regularly and do yoga, but nothing seems to alleviate this. It's not painful, it just maddening because as soon as I crack, the urge to do it again is right back.mthis goes on from morning until night, and I find it hard to sleep because I can't get comfortable. I came and sounds like other people experience what I do, so I guess it's good to know I'm not the only one.

Elle, thanks for sharing your story. I can very much relate to your experiences, you are definitely not alone. I also find this highly annoying and disruptive. It is very iteresting that in some cases symptoms only affect one side of the body. This has never been the case for me, always symmetric on my end. I document the stuff which helps me, in here. Please share when you find help for you.

If the cause is oxolate sensitivity plausible treatment is a low oxolate diet.

Further treaments listed by the pain foundation, like Ox absorb.

I found an interesting post today:
@lstroyan:

I've been trying to find a solution to similar issues – cracking joints all the time, including my jaw, toes, neck, back, etc, getting worse as aching and painful movement, weakness.

I posted to a list I'm on and someone suggested oxalate sensitivity. Apparently oxalates can build up in the tissues and cause all kinds of problems. I've only been experimenting for a bit over a week but it seems highly connected so far. When I keep a low oxalate diet along with supplements, I feel much better, and I tested the reverse on a camping trip and felt worse again. So far the K2 has been the most helpful, but only with some of the other things too. Sometimes the K2 has completely taken away my joint pain within minutes, other times (I think when I didn't take magnesium perhaps) it helps a little over a couple days (I'm up to 300-500 mcg using Thorne K2/D3 drops but am switching to the 1mg drops without D3 soon).

Here's what I came up with for my own personal plan:

• Not too much Vitamin D or Vitamin C, or fish oil (can't remember why)

• Drop milk thistle (and turmeric if taking it) as it's very high oxalate

• increase Magnesium (switch from glycinate to citrate),

• slowly Add Thorne Vitamin K2

• Add Thiamine and B6 as enyme co-factors

• Take a little Calcium citrate with meals or have dairy with any oxalate

• Take probiotics (I'll start with homemade kefir)

• Drink lots of water to help the liver excrete it

• Don't remove oxalate all at once, take out very high sources first, because too low causes dumping

• Dumping isn't uncommon -- take the supplements to help

• Thyroid can be involved in oxalates (I'm on Armour), so watch this

• mercury can be involved with oxalate issues (I have cell-resident mercury/lead)

The main things I had been eating that I eliminated were almost all nuts/seeds and nut/seed butters/oils, quinoa, almond flour, rhubarb, chard, most wheat, and most chocolate. When I first started researching oxalates because my pain was intense, I realized I had eaten almost all of these -- including the rhubarb -- in one day!

I'd be very curious if anyone else tries this, to hear how you do.

Lisa

I am not sure if this can be the cause for joint cracking pressures without visible kidney stones, maybe there are slight oxolate sensitivities with various conditions?

What do you think?

The so-called CCP-test might be useful to diagnose rheumatoid arthritis without inflammation
@labtestsonline.org:

A cyclic citrullinated peptide (CCP) antibody test may be ordered along with or following a rheumatoid factor (RF) test to help diagnose rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and to assess the severity and probable course of the disease (prognosis). CCP antibody may also be ordered to help evaluate the likely development of RA in people with undifferentiated arthritis – those whose symptoms suggest but do not yet meet the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) criteria for RA. According to ACR, approximately 95% of those with a positive CCP antibody will meet the criteria of RA in the future.

According to various sources like this one you can have rheumatoid arthritis without any indication of inflammation.
@creinah:

Yes, it's possible to have RA and normal inflammatory markers. It's also possible to have RA without swelling.

corroborated by this source
@curley:

To answer your question yes it is possible to have that kind of pain with out inflammation.I will aslo say this that many people test negative for for ra and other types of arthritis as well,but does not mean that you do not have it.

About 5 years of more joint cracking "experience" prompted me to update my personal long time observations.