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Do Your Joints Creak and Crack?

If you’re wondering if sounding like a rusty robot full of pops, cracks and creaks when you move will lead to arthritis, Dr. Andrew Lavender, a physiotherapist who’s made it his goal to get to the bare bones of noisy joints, has put your concerns to rest, according to DailyMail.com. The noise comes from the movement of tendon over bone, but there’s no compelling evidence that it leads to osteoarthritis.

This is good news, but it doesn’t solve the problem of how to deal with aching joints, which often can be helped by simple exercise if you’re dealing with osteoarthritis, which typically occurs in older individuals, and affects the distal joints, or the joints at the end of your fingers and toes, not the middle ones.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a more severe form of an autoimmune disease that causes your immune system to attack the tissues that line your joints. RA can occur at any age, and tends to be bilateral and symmetrical.

While many resort to drugs to alleviate their pain for either condition, some natural ways of dealing with it include dietary modifications such as eliminating sugar/fructose and most grains from your diet, eating a large portion of your food raw, and getting plenty of high-quality animal-based omega-3 fats such as krill oil. Optimizing your vitamin D levels is also important. Astaxanthin is a powerful anti-inflammatory antioxidant too. If you do need a drug, low-dose naltrexone may help.