Weather Sensitivity - Why It Doesn't Always Make Sense

I just came back from a doctor's office visit. Between he and I, we could corroborate every instance where weather, specifically frontal systems, made my chronic symptoms worse. Why is that? He had 4 or 5 other patients who encountered the same exacerbation of symptoms at the same intervals. That's why.

A lot of us can remember someone like "old aunt Thelma" who had that ability to predict the weather based on how they felt. The group that once delivered backyard weather predictions has grown and changed to a segment of the population that has weather-sensitive chronic symptoms. They literally feel under the weather and they usually feel it when the weather changes.

While there have been a lot of studies seeking to tie conditions to weather patterns, few have had scientifically valid conclusions, meaning that while there were definite trends present, not all of the scientific criteria were met. While I have no in-depth analysis of the studies, I would suspect that the key criterion missing is a sufficiently large sample of the population. It could also be a lack of adequate controls, as most studies with large enough populations are unable to limit all of the outside factors that would affect the data. You just can't pay 5,000 people to spend the next 6 weeks in a laboratory unless it involves TV cameras and "unscripted" scripts. Finally, I can't imagine a study that has yet considered the impact of microclimates on the data.

So there's a lot of challenges to any weather sensitivity study for science. What about a person's own empirical data? Anyone with chronic symptoms can keep track of the weather and how they felt. The problem comes when they sit down and try to attach their symptoms to one or two things, such as changes in temperature or precipitation or wind. Even the more nuts-and-bolts readings like air pressure and relative humidity aren't always going to yield a specific trend when analyzing the changes, although some smaller studies have previously linked a drop in air pressure and rising humidity to things like arthritic pain. My own work in this area has confirmed this, although other weather factors like local precipitation and other, non-weather factors such as rest, diet and stress play as much of a role in my symptoms as changes in pressure and humidity.

The bottom line seems to be that there is a relationship, but the relationship varies from person to person. Weather will always change, and folks will usually be able to tell when it will, for the most part. Hopefully, technology will improve to where complex monitoring of the subject is possible, putting the subject on ice. It's possible that someday, such suffering will be a thing of the past and people will feel right as rain, whatever the weather.