Knuckle cracking is an annoying, nerve-wracking habit that comes with its own built-in punishment: namely, arthritis. If you keep on crackin', karma will eventually bite you in the ass in the shape of a painful, potentially disfiguring joint disease. But what else could you expect? You're cracking your knuckles.
But Actually ...
First of all, it helps to understand what knuckle cracking actually is. You're not grinding your bones or popping your joints out of place -- the noise is just tiny gas bubbles popping in the fluid in the joints of your fingers.
They're like party poppers with less clean-up.
There have been multiple studies into the habit, which is how we know which gender cracks their knuckles more (men), how prevalent the habit is, and that it does NOT, in fact, cause arthritis.
If you don't believe any of those studies, maybe you can at least trust a scientist named Donald Unger, who undertook a 50- (50!) year study of the effects of habitually cracking your knuckles, using his own left hand as the test subject and the right hand as a relatively crack-free "control group." Did we mention he did this every day for 50 years? We feel that part cannot be repeated enough.
In the end, he found that there was no correlation between arthritis and knuckle cracking, since both of the hands were fine, and the only discriminating thing about either of them was the fact that they were attached to a potentially crazy person. The scientific community made it known what they thought about the importance of Unger's work by awarding him an Ig Nobel Prize, the closest thing to a Razzie that science can get away with. The dude was still right, though.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crack-research/
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