Bad back? Aching joints? Don’t blame the weather

Researchers debunk age-old belief that people’s aches and pains can be linked with rainy days

THE belief that joints ache more in rainy weather has been debunked by scientists at Harvard University.

Some 2,500 years after the Greeks first noticed a connection between pain and the weather, the research has finally shown definitively that there is no truth in the belief.

In the biggest study into the complaint, researchers studied 11 million visits to GPS by more than 1.5million pensioners in the United States between 2008 and 2012.

They then looked to see if there was a correlation between rainfall and an increase in the reporting of joint or back complaints. They found nothing.

Overall, 6.35 per cent of visits to doctors included reports of pain on rainy days, compared with 6.39 per cent on dry days. The researchers say the study was so large that it is inconceivable that they would not have spotted a link if one existed.

“It’s hard to prove a negative,” said lead author Prof Anupam Jena of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy. “But in this flood of data, if there was a clinically significant increase in pain, we would have expected to find at least some small, but significant, sign of the effect. We didn’t.

“No matter how we looked at the data, we didn’t see any correlation between rainfall and physician visits for joint pain or back pain.

“The bottom line is: painful joints and sore backs may very well be unreliable forecasters.”

The notion that aching joints and gloomy weather go hand-in-hand has persisted since antiquity.

Hippocrates, writing in On Airs, Waters, and Places, claimed that those who wished to understand medicine should look at the changing seasons of the year and study the prevailing winds to see how the weather they bring affects health.

The belief has endured over the centuries and well into the present, fuelled by a combination of folklore and small studies that have repeatedly yielded mixed results.

An ongoing study by the University of Manchester, which published its early results last year, found that as the number of sunny days increased from February to June, people with chronic joint conditions felt better. However when there was a period of wet weather in June and fewer hours of sunlight, pain increased once again.

Prof Jena said the human brain was good at finding patterns, even when they do not really exist.

If people expect their knee to hurt when it rains and it does not, they forget about it, he said, but if it hurts they blame it on the rain, which sticks in the mind because of verification bias.

The research was published in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal.