From allergies to migraines to arthritis to mood swings, the atmosphere has profound effects on our well-being

Hundreds of millions throughout the world who have endured the torments of arthritis, migraines, and assorted other ailments have at least one thing in common: They blame the weather.

And it’s not all in their heads. So say medical professionals such as Harvard University headache specialist Paul G. Mathew, even if the research findings are often at odds with what their patients experience.

“We are so certain that weather affects our health that to feel ill or be sick is synonymous with being ‘under the weather,‘” declared physiologist Frederick Sargent II, a pioneer in the science of biometeorology, the study of the atmosphere’s effects on the health of humans and other organisms.

For thousands of years, that climate and weather governed our health was an assumption. Credible research supports that headaches may have been prehistoric smartphone alerts warning our ancestors of coming storms.

Indeed, the weather-health connection was an impetus for creating a U.S. national weather service.

For a variety of reasons, the linkages came to be viewed as almost primitive, in the realm of superstition and folklore. But this disconnection is a surprisingly modern phenomenon, perhaps proving that humans can progress their way out of common sense.

The human body and the atmosphere are profoundly interrelated, one of the most magical and complex intersections in the known universe.

Biometeorology has been experiencing a renaissance. That dynamic and often mysterious relationship has taken on new urgency with anxieties over accelerating climate change. How might rising temperatures affect allergies, disease vectors, the spread of viruses, the intensity of heat waves?

Research has linked weather and its ever-changing behavior to everything from sexual activity to purchasing decisions to diets, from melancholy to irrational exuberance, from insomnia to mental acuity, from mood changes to the behavior of the stock market.

I have long been fascinated by the dramas of the atmosphere and rhythms of the seasons and how they play out in my own mental and physical health.

Some exist day to day, some air mass to air mass. I was aching to learn more about the interplay of the environment and health. That was my impetus for writing Something in the Air: A Four-Season Guide to Weather and Health, published by Prometheus Books, which goes on sale Tuesday.

I discovered during my research that I was among good company, joining a pursuit that long predates even Hippocrates.

We journalists have our own diluted version of a Hippocratic Oath. In that spirit I have done my best to transcend my own preconceptions and biases to present objectively what is and isn’t known about the body–atmosphere relationship — inescapable even in our managed indoor environments. The literature on the subject is voluminous, and ranges from embracing to dismissive — sometimes both simultaneously.

Studies have shown almost everything, but it is known that:

One of the giants of arthritic research, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania’s Joseph L. Hollander, founder of the American Arthritis Foundation, took on the attribution issue in one of the grand experiments in the history of biometeorology.

Misattribution is a common problem, as Mathew points out: How does one tease out the effects of a front passage from a poor night’s sleep or indiscriminate consumption. A hangover is more likely to cause a headache than barometric pressure changes.

Hollander aimed to isolate the variables. In the 1960s, he built a “Climatron” inside the hospital where patients lived in two-week intervals, during which he subjected patients to extreme changes in atmospheric variables.

His variations of temperature and humidity were in the realm of normal, but his changes in barometric pressure — the weight of the air pressing upon us — demonstrated that medical experts aren’t necessarily conversant with meteorology.

Pressure ordinarily changes ever-so-gradually with approaching and departing storms and fronts and can cause painful expansion and contractions of joints and tissues. But the ranges to which the patients were subjected in six-hour periods were far beyond anything experienced around here or maybe anywhere.

Such a radical change in such a compressed period would be the stuff of meteorological history, said Jim Eberwine, a former National Weather Service meteorologist.

As the National Research Council has pointed out, collaboration between the medical and meteorological communities will be essential to weather-body research.

The majority of Hollander’s subjects did indeed respond to pressure changes. But to his puzzlement, some didn’t.

In his journals, the inquisitive and persistent Hollander wrote about “the innumerable frustrations and hours of wasted effort to achieve data reportable only in a ‘Journal of Negative Results.‘”

Given that some of the patients did show some pain response, Hollander concluded by saying he had proved a weather-arthritis connection.

» READ MORE: Under the weather? A season-by-season look at how the atmosphere affects your body and health

In his grand experiment, he proved a fundamental principle of the science that was so obvious he appeared to miss it. All bodies are unique, and it would be far more surprising if they responding the same way to conditions in the atmosphere.

In the end, Hollander and other researchers have affirmed that among all the conflicting results, something critically important, indeed, is in the air.

And ignoring the atmosphere’s effects on our well-being is as much folly as ignoring diet and exercise in the pursuit of health.