Are you guilty of cracking your neck or back? I sure am. But in a new turn of events, I’ll probably try to quit the habit—and it might make you want to do the same.
A 28-year-old man named Josh Hader popped his neck and as a result, he suffered a stroke.
We had no idea something that dire could happen from a simple movement, but doctors say that the neck popping caused Hader to tear his vertebral artery. It was a pretty horrible situation for the Oklahoma man.
“The moment I heard the pop, everything on my left side started to go numb,” Hader said. “I got up and tried to get an ice pack from the fridge, and I remember I couldn’t walk straight.”
Even though this sounds pretty terrible, things could have ended up even worse. “He could have formed more clot on that tear and had a life-ending stroke,” Dr. Vance McCollom said. “He could have died.”
Thankfully, Hader is still alive, though he does have a few long-term effects from the stroke, such as vision problems and problems with walking. He also suffered severe, painful hiccups for a week afterwards.
Additionally, he’s struggling with not being able to care for his son as well as he used to. “I can’t pick him up out of the crib, give him milk in the middle of the night,” Hader said. “I can’t do any of that.”
It seems a little harsh for something so terrible to happen to someone who was just innocently cracking his neck. So many of us do this multiple times a day. The problem is, there’s a certain way to crack and a certain way not to crack.
“If you want to pop your neck, just kind of pop it side to side,” McCollom said. “Don’t twist it. Whenever you twist it, there’s a risk of tearing that vessel.”
To learn more about what happened to Josh, check out the video below.
Do you pop your neck? What do you think of what happened to this man from doing this?
