When winter brings rain and cold, hospital outpatient clinics multiply their visits with people who, apparently, suffer from joint or lumbar ailments. According to new research from Harvard Medical School , this should not be the case, as there is no relationship between ‘bad weather’ and pain .
Prior to the recent study, different investigations had been carried out on this same phenomenon. However, the results are very different from each other and the assertion that climate and discomfort go hand in hand was wrongly accepted.
Anupam Jena , from the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, has been commissioned to lead the project, combining two sets of data: the first includes information on primary care visits for joint or back pain ; and, the second, specific data on daily rainfall levels by geographic postal code.
According to the first method, which looked at a large collection of data between 2008 and 2012 , older Americans (65 years and older) made more than 11 million visits to primary care offices . Consultations increased considerably in rainy periods compared to drier times.
“No matter how we looked at the data, we didn’t see any correlation between rain and doctor visits for joint and back pain,” Jena says. “It is difficult to show that it is negative, but in this flood of data, if there was a clinically significant increase in pain, we would have expected to find at least a small , albeit significant, sign of this phenomenon . But it was not,” he adds.
In bad weather, good back
Given the different hypotheses that were raised during the research, the analysis of patients over 65 years of age finally showed that there is no relationship between rain and outpatient visits for joint or back pain.
The approach allowed to effectively compare the rates of joint or low back pain between periods with and without precipitation within the same geographic region, addressing the concern that pain rates may differ systematically in different regions with varying levels of precipitation .
Overall, 6.35% of office visits included reports of pain on rainy days , compared to 6.39% on dry days.
According to Jena, brain power is the key.
The mind has a great facility for creating patterns and establishing links. So, if you expect your knee to hurt when it rains and it doesn’t, you forget about it, but if it hurts and it’s the rain’s fault, this relationship tends to stick in your mind.
“As physicians, we must be sensitive to the things our patients tell us. Pain is pain, rain or not. But it is important to know that, clinically, joint pain does not seem to flow with the weather,” he explains .
