Good Question Why Does Weather Cause Body Aches?
(WCCO) -- We can all see the crazy wind and the spitting rain. But you can't see low pressure. However, some of us can feel it in our joints and our bones.
"As the pressure comes in, you feel those aches and pains, and say, well a storm is coming in," said Coventry Cowles, who e-mailed after co-workers at the College of St. Catherine started complaining.
Why does weather affect our bodies?
"That's what makes it a Good Question, I would have no idea what would be the cause of something like that," said Tim Alms, who reports hearing the pain as soon as the pressure started to drop.
"I have a toe that was broken at one time and it just kind of started to throb and it was strange that it happened," said Alms. "You can tell when the weather is changing just by things starting to ache."
Doctors believe that the pain isn't just psychological, it's a real phenomenon.
"You'd think that people would have better things to do with their time but that's actually a subject that's been researched a lot," said Pat Yoon, M.D., an orthopedic specialist at Hennepin County Medical Center.
"It seems like lower pressure causes problems, lower temperature causes problems and higher humidity causes problems," he said.
Researchers have put people into hyperbaric chambers, lowered the air pressure and had them record when and if they feel pain.
"Within a relatively short period of time of the pressure going down, people started to report an increase in pain in their joints," said Yoon.
When you put marshmallows in a vacuum chamber and drop the pressure, the marshmallows expand. The same thing may be happening to the fluid coating out joints.
"We don't fully understand yet why that happens. Something about the presence of concentration of gas in the blood and in the joints can have something to do with that. They are all things being looked at and we don't have a full answer yet," he said.
The same pain happens to people prone to migraines. On Facebook, Kathy wrote that "any change in pressure can trigger me."
Specialists say they see the correlation all the time, but controlled studies haven't proven it.
"These people aren't crazy. There's enough of them that are complaining about this, they must have something to it," said Yoon.