I crack my knuckles quite often, mainly because they feel like they need to be cracked, I am sure you know the feeling. The way I normally crack my knuckles is just locking my fingers and stretching my arms, though I can often just move my fingers back without my other hand to crack them. Is this bad for me? I've looked at a couple pages (1) but I want you fellow smart people and knuckle crackers' opinions.
(I also roll my toes over and crack them, is this bad?)
7 out of 10 of my fingers are double jointed and I've never had any problems from cracking my knuckles, which I've been doing since I was around 8 years old.
Are your thumbs double or triple jointed? Any fingers triple jointed?
There is no evidence in the literature that consistently points to "cracking joints" being a cause of degenerative joint disease of any kind. In fact, the hypothesis that the sound came from rapidly generated bubbles of CO2 gas is still under scrutiny.
However cracking joints is a by-product of joint manipulation, and sometimes joint manipulation can exacerbate existing joint conditions. For example the major concern with chiropractic manipulation of the spine for lower back pain is that while it provides good short-term symptomatic relief, standard medical school of thought warns against it as it seems to worsen osteophyte development in the long term.
I don't think you should do it too much but maybe once or twice a day is good, I used to do it for about a year or two but then I stopped just in case I would damage my fingers.
