What is Crepitus?

I sometimes have knee crepitus. I was in a car wreck years ago and injured my knee cap, and ever since then, it will crack from time to time when I move a certain way.

It often happens when I’m doing stretches before a workout. It seems strange that stretching would cause this, because it is meant to warm up the joints and muscles so that cracking and straining won’t occur.

Any time I bend my knee and lean forward as if to do a lunge, I hear cracking. I can almost bet on that. It kind of makes me feel as if I’ve thrown my knee out for a moment, but it doesn’t take long to recover.

For a few seconds, I feel vulnerable. A slight tinge of pain shoots through my leg, but it disappears rather quickly. I didn’t have knee surgery after the accident, so who knows what all is going on in there.

I have had crepitus in my joints before. I’ve never had any pain from it, though.

I did wonder what made the sound. I knew that it must not be harmful, because it didn’t hurt at all.

Sometimes, when I lift free weights, I hear a cracking sound in my elbow and my shoulder. It is loud and doesn’t sound like a good thing, but it seems to have no effect on the way my joints work. I guess as long as it’s not doing any harm, I don’t need to have anything done about it.

@orangey03 - The crepitus I had with walking pneumonia is similar to what you had with bronchitis. The illness was confusing to me, because it seemed like a regular old cold at first, but instead of getting better, I got much worse after a couple of weeks.

I started out with a sore throat and congested sinuses. The congestion did not go away, and later on, I became really nauseous. I felt certain that I would vomit, but I never did.

I developed a cough. My lungs seemed to be full of mucus, but oddly enough, I didn’t seem to be coughing it up very much. I could hear a crackling sound when I exhaled, though, and that worried me.

My doctor determined that I had walking pneumonia because of my progressive symptoms. She gave me antibiotics, and in a few days, the crepitus and all my other symptoms were gone.

I have experienced crepitus with bronchitis before. I’ve never had pneumonia, but bronchitis is one step below it, and anything that causes your lungs or bronchial tubes to make crackling sounds is serious.

I’m sure it sounded really bad through a stethoscope, but it sounded bad enough just to my ears. Every time I would cough, I could hear what sounded like fluid crackling, and with every breath I took, I could hear wheezing in my chest.

There was no resting with this condition. I had to see a doctor, because I felt as though I were drowning. I don’t think I could have recovered from it on my own.

I've heard that a crepitus sounds like "rice krispies" under a stethoscope. Listening for that sound would be incredibly useful to medical professionals who are not sure whether a patient has any internal injury.