How did this idea come about? Perhaps it can be traced back to the Greek physician Hippocrates, who coined the term “arthritis” as early as 400 B.C. and wrote about its connection to the weather in his book. Today, nearly 60 percent of people with rheumatoid arthritis in the United States still feel that their condition is related to changes in the weather; many even claim they can predict the weather from this. While we’re on the subject of Hippocrates, let’s not forget that he also had a brilliant theory about arthritis: that arthritis is caused by overeating and that toxins in the body worsen the condition, so they need to be flushed out of the body. If you ask doctors today, they will probably insist that the weather has no or very little effect on arthritis. The medical community has always been divided as to whether the condition of arthritis is weather related. Years of research, despite many results, have been mostly confusing and contradictory. Some say it is related, while others refute that it is not. Some studies suggest that pain symptoms are exacerbated when the air is humid or the barometric pressure is elevated. Others have found the opposite to be true. Some studies suggest that weather changes affect arthritis pain symptoms for only a short period of time, while others find that the effect lasts for several days. In short, the public has a point and the public has a point! But most studies have found that there is actually no link between the two. One group of researchers followed 18 arthritis patients for 15 months and found no correlation between the patients’ daily subjective pain sensations and the local weather forecast. Another group followed 75 patients with rheumatoid arthritis and compared their diaries with local weather conditions over a 75-day follow-up period, and found that the pain sensations reported by these patients themselves were most pronounced on cold days, cloudy days, and days after high pressure. Overall, however, this effect was not statistically significant. Most scientists theorize that the reason for this claim is probably also due to the human instinct to create something out of nothing. When something happens by chance, we always hope to find some “pattern” to explain it. If you have pain in your joints from time to time, you will want to find the cause, so in this case, you will most likely use external events as a breakthrough, not to mention that people have been tirelessly searching for answers for thousands of years. But some people don’t buy it. Another great possibility is that weather changes only affect arthritis associated with inflammatory responses, such as rheumatoid arthritis; and the reason most studies don’t find an association is that they conflate the various types. One of the major pathological features of patients with rheumatoid arthritis is an increase in the amount of synovial fluid in the joints, so it may not be difficult to understand how a change in weather to cold and changes in air pressure can have an effect. A large study published in 2002 in the journal Rheumatology showed that patients with rheumatoid arthritis had more pronounced pain in cold weather, high air pressure and humidity compared to patients with osteoarthritis.