Weather Alert: Feel It in Your Bones? Grab Your Umbrella!

As Erin, the season’s first named hurricane, churns across the Atlantic, some New Yorkers won’t need a weather report to follow its progress. An entire group of experts told the Washington Post these folks will track it in their bones .

The idea that somebody’s bones can predict weather changes has been around for centuries, all the way back to Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine. He also proposed dozens of ways that seasonal weather affected human health. But as Yale neurologist Sarah Mulukutla told the Post, “Doctors have long minimized these complaints as subjective.”

No more. The old phenomenon now has a new authentically scientific name: Meteoropathy. The Washington Post report defines that as “the study of physiological reactions to environmental changes, especially barometric shifts, that disrupt circulation and rattle the nervous system.” While Meteoropathic illness hasn’t yet made it into the formal dictionary of diagnoses, scientists here and abroad report finding evidence they say will eventually put it there

When it does, the lesson will be that the problem isn’t the rain. It’s the change in atmospheric pressure, which falls ahead of an approaching storm.

Two years ago, Japanese investigators analyzed the link between more than 300,000 headache events and the barometer. Their conclusion? As so many have suspected, higher humidity and falling rain are strongly associated with increased headaches. At the same time, additional reports in the journals Brain Research Bulletin and PLoSOne testify that falling atmospheric pressure turns on the human autonomic nervous system and heightens pain sensitivity in people with chronic conditions such as arthritis. In fact, the Arthritis Foundation wrote in the Annals of Medicine that many people with arthritis experience flare-ups during weather change. The situation has been observed in animal research, which shows that high humidity increases the body’s number of inflammatory cytokines, proteins that function as chemical messengers that exacerbate joint discomfort by sending signals to the brain and spinal cord telling the immune system to fight off invaders such as disease-causing bacteria. According to UCLA neurologist Alan Rapoport, it doesn’t take much to produce the problem, especially for the 12 percent of Americans who suffer from migraine.

Until the magic day when humans discover how to control the weather, those in the know offered the Washington Post a list of basic ways to mitigate the barometric damage. First up: Keep a journal. As Dr. Rapoport points out, tracking daily symptoms may produce a pattern that enables one to predict the point when problems loom. Wearing wearables such as an Apple watch or Whoop, Migraine Mentor, and N1-Headache may be a second way to track patterns and atmospheric shifts .

Other observers vote for gentle exercise that boosts activity in order to improve circulation and joint flexibility while also making it possible to keep track of pain cues. The best examples are tai chi, yoga, and everyone’s whole-body Gold Standard: walking. More cerebral possibilities are meditation and regular breathwork to calm the nervous system.

In the end, the trick is to be proactive. When a sensitive weather day looms, prioritize protection. Get enough sleep and limit brain-bouncing stress such as time spent viewing all available everyday screens. And keep an umbrella handy for insurance.