Everybody had that one kid in their third-grade class who could do gross party tricks, folding her body into a pretzel or twisting his fingers into strange configurations. Double-jointedness is certainly weird. But is it dangerous? That really depends on the person, and what else their body is doing.
The medical term for this extreme bendiness is joint hypermobility (JH). Experts have recently suggested sorting this trait into three different types. There’s the harmless kind (called asymptomatic JH); the kind that can cause pain (hypermobility spectrum disorders, or HSD); and the kind that’s actually a symptom of some other underlying medical condition.
Asymptomatic JH is very common. Many party-trick kids, super-flexible ballet dancers, and circus contortionists are not in pain, nor are their joints dangerously loose. But for people with HSD, that hypermobility is a problem, or it can become one as they get older. The same flexibility that can make a person a better dancer…
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