This post is to clear a very common height increase argument found on many other websites which say that with consistent tensile loading or stretching, one can get the human body to elongate.
I remember looking at the pages of National Geographic and seeing these females of some tribe in Southeast Asia and wondered when I was in elementary school how they managed to stretch their neck. For the average person who has not done the neccesary height increase research, the idea that one can increase one’ height from using the same basic principles as those females in the tribes who wear neck rings is plausible.
However what really happens is that the collar bone or clavicle in the frontal region of the sternum get compressed downward which creates more space for the rings to move into. If we analyze the skeletal structure of the upper body consisting of the skulls, cervical vertebrate, and the sternum we see that besides the clavicle, there is actually a large area of space between the shoulder blade and the vertebrate irregular bones which make up the neck. If we analyze the distribution of the neck rings, we note that as the rings descend down, their width and size do increase to take into account for the attachment of the vertebrate to the ribcage. Refer to skeleton pic HERE.
The coils are usually about 2-3 kgs in weight and the adult female usually has about 20 rings around their neck, although there seems to be cases where there are women with 25 rings.
From sources (source 2) we learn that the history and reason for this practiced is unknown but speculated. It was thought that maybe the females did this form of body deformation to make them unattractive for other tribes and invaders to want to marry them. From other sources it seems that not only do they have the rings to wear around their necks, they also have rings to wear on wrists and ankles and also elephant tusks which pierce the earlobe and over time stretching them out due to gravity.
The point is that the neck rings are not really stretching out the necks of the tribes women or making them taller. The clavicle bones in the front side of the body/torso gets pushed downwards. It turns out that the clavicle is one of the few long bones in the human body which is easily broken or dislocated from the other bones it is supposed to be attached to.
The metal bars pushing downwards on young woman can deform the cartilage on the sides as well as stretch out the ligaments attaching the clavicle to the sternal wall or the scapula/shoulder bone. If you manage to break past the clavicle, there is actually a large space or cavity which the rings can fall into. It creates the illusion that the women in this native tribe in Burma can stretch out their neck. However, it is just an illusion.
