Hi everyone,
Over the past few weeks the weather in the Southeast has been cold but not too bad. In the cooler months patients have come to clinic with complaints about how the weather has affected their aches and pains. Changes in the weather and reports that damp weather increases pains and going on holidays to sunnier climes reduces pains, are reports I hear all the time.
I began to wonder if there was any scientific basis to what they were saying!
Well....as far back as Hippocrates relationships between weather and human diseases have been reported (Lowry and Lowry, 2001). The Asian symbol for rheumatism (Fong Shi) is literally translated as ‘wind’ and ‘wet’ (Ng et al., 2004), and the disease is known as ‘‘wind wet disease” in Chinese (Tsai et al., 2006). This may account for some of the positive responses patients get with acupuncture and weather related pain.
Many patients with rheumatic diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis claim that they feel worse before or during weather changes. Jamison et al. (1995) gave a weather and pain questionnaire to 558 patients with chronic pain and found that 68% believed that changes in weather affected their pain. Of these patients, 53% stated that their pain was affected before weather changes, 62% that their pain was affected during weather changes, while only 11% said that their pain was affected after weather changes.
Shutty et al. (1992) had 70 chronic pain patients complete another weather and pain questionnaire. Only 3% of the patients reported no association between weather and their pain.
Hendler et al. (1995) found that between 50% and 100% of patients with various diagnoses of chronic pain reported that they their pain always got worse with changing weather.
If you want to escape air pressure changes that cause pain, the best places to live is Hawaii and southernmost California so when it's stormy, grab your suitcase.
Scientists found that while psychologically, many migraine sufferers believe weather helps determine when they get headaches, fewer actually are affected when weather data was matched up to the patients' own logs of headache occurrences. Temperature and humidity were the most prominent factors in migraine headaches, some sufferers appeared sensitive to high temperatures and high humidity while others were sensitive to the exact opposite.
In the end, however, patients couldn't accurately predict their own weather sensitivity, despite knowing they were sensitive.
Experts advise that the best way to handle this inconsistency is for individual patients to be aware of their own sensitivities and to work with healthcare professionals to figure out the best way to handle the onset of migraine headaches brought on by all relevant weather factors.
Allodynia:
Dealing with patients in pain means that you are aware of the many ways in which the nervous system, which senses pain, can become faulty. A feature known as ‘allodynia’ is when a person feels pain in response to a stimulus that is not usually painful. This means that when a person has ‘sat in a draft’ or experiences pain with weather changes it may mean that their nervous system is responding in an overly sensitive way. Warmth can ease this symptom and often patients will wrap a scarf around their neck to feel better.
So, as the weather warnings hit the headlines, some of us will be looking forward to the warmth it will bring and a change in how we feel. Personally, I like the idea of travelling to California!
Do you think the weather affects your body? Are you more sensitive when it is too hot or too cold? Let us know in the comments below.