Your Knee Begins to Ache When Rain Comes?

“My knee begins to ache. There must be a heavy rain.” The sky is blue, and it does not look like rain or storm is coming. Still, your grandmother says so tapping her back and legs. Surprisingly, then, dark cloud swarms in and a heavy rain starts to fall. Is it true that the human body can foretell the weather through unusual signals?

As early as 400 B.C, when father of medicine Hippocrates was practicing, people believed that some illnesses get worse when weather was bad. And the debate over the relation between the human body and weather has continued since then.

Seeing people with joint diseases foreseeing bad weather, scientists have studied the correlation between joint diseases and weather conditions. Still, they have failed to find any clue.

Online medical journal `Web MD` recently published an interesting article on the correlation between the human body and weather conditions. Although they did not specify how weather conditions degrade a joint ache or other diseases, they pointed out that weather conditions indeed affect the human body.

They noted the fact that atmospheric pressure drops when bad weather comes, and hypothesized that tissues around joint areas begin to swallow up when the pressure drops, degrading the pain.

They conducted an experiment to prove their point. First, put balloons in a room and adjust the level of pressure. When the pressure drops, balloons begin to swell up. What if the result of the experiment is applied to humans? Researchers said that foul weather might irritate nerves around joints and aggravate inflammations.

corekim@donga.com