All right, hey, Dr. Ryan Hetland here. Welcome to today's video. Today I'm talking to you about something that hit my nerve when I saw videos of physical therapists, even chiropractors who just general-- whoever on YouTube, pretty popular video saying crack your own back without a chiropractor or a physical therapist.

And what I have to say of that is, "Are you kidding me?" The spine itself is very delicate. You want to be very careful when it comes to your spine. When it comes to your hands or your knuckles and your fingers, you know, it's hard to do much damage, especially if you're not being too aggressive and really twisting your joints and your ligaments.

But when it comes to the disc in your spine, I use these examples all the time, where you have the vertebra and the disc that you're trying to "cavitate" and get to pop, how do most people do this when they're trying to get their own neck to adjust their neck? They twist their neck like this and they twist it like that, or they get it to just aggressively stretch it, and aggression twisting or stretching is dangerous, of course, dangerous to the nerve because the vertebra can subluxate, and then, just get straight up stuck in the wrong position or even worse, it goes in the path of least resistance and makes your condition worse, which is why you feel the need to crack your own neck or back in the first place.

So the other thing besides a joint in your hand or your wrist is your spine has delicate nerves that pop out of each side of the spine. These nerves go up to your head. They go to organs, glands, tissues. If you're aggressively moving them out of position, which, when you're adjusting your own spine, you have no idea if they're moving in the position or out of position, causing problems or not. This is why there are trained professionals in the world to do this for you at an affordable price.

So, here's the thing, when it comes to trying to "crack" your own neck, the main thing you need to really be worried about and concerned about when trying to do this sort of thing with your neck and all that is twisting. The spine hates to be twisted and it actually causes problems. I always tell patients who have neck or back problems who are needing to heal, they're injured, they ask me, "What should I not do?" And the main thing I tell them is don't bend and twist, especially with any weight at all because that's the weakest position for your disc to be injured or reinjured to begin with.

So I'm guessing if you're watching this video, you've got neck problems or back problems that are creating you to feel the need to crack your own back or neck, and that's really just a sign you need to be evaluated precisely. I don't adjust anyone's spine personally without an X-ray, unless they're pregnant, and even in that case, I'm trying my best to not twist the spine using the Gonstead method I use.

So, here's the thing, twisting the neck-terrible idea. The lowback ideas when I saw other videos, they're wanting you to lie on your back and twist your leg over and kind of torque your body into this twisted state, which, again, is a terrible idea. And I know some chiropractic techniques do that. Some physical therapists say they're not adjusting, but they're just twisting, and if it happens to crack, so be it.

But here's the thing, when you're twisting the spine, it's not a great idea. The last one that I saw, which was silly and dangerous is trying to crack the middle of your back by really squeezing your arms together and bashing your back against a chair or, you know, obviously, when you say it like that, you kind of go, "Okay, hello?"

Or if you do that, and you bash your back hard enough against a solid floor surface, I saw a video of someone doing that. Now if you're desperate and like there's nowhere you're in a third world country, there are no chiropractors around, well, then, you know, do it at your own risk. But if you live in an area where there are good chiropractors that are affordable, it's so worth it, I mean, you spend more money on the dumbest things than just trying to, you know, fix your back.

So this really struck a nerve with me watching it, going "Jeez, this is terrible advice," and I think it hits a nerve with, obviously, a lot of people because millions of people are viewing videos like that. So, hopefully, this video was valuable for you, and if you care to share, share the video with your friends.

I hope you have a great day and feel free to comment. Let me know what your thoughts are.