Back pain
Why your back hurts when the weather changes
Autumn arrives, the pressure drops, the mornings turn cold and your back lets you know. Many people tell me the same thing in my practice, and some add that they feel the weather change before the forecast shows it. What they want to know is whether they are imagining it or whether it is real. The honest answer has two halves, and I will give you both.
What the data show, in short
Across large populations the link does not show up. The clearest test was carried out in the United States on 11 million visits to family doctors, and the result was published in 2017 in the BMJ. The researchers compared rainy days with dry days and looked at whether people saw a doctor for back or joint pain more often when it rained. They found no difference at all.
It is a surprising result, because it runs against what a great many people feel. Yet it says less than it seems to, since all it measured was how often people went to the doctor, and it cannot tell you anything about the day your own back hurt more.
Why we believe so strongly in the weather link
This is where the way our minds keep score comes in, and the explanation was set down on paper back in 1996 by Redelmeier and Tversky, in PNAS. For 15 months they followed people with arthritis and compared the pain they recorded with the real weather data.
Across the whole group the link did not show up. Yet almost every participant was convinced it existed, and the explanation the two authors offered catches all of us. We remember the days when we were in pain and the weather outside was bad, because they fit what we already believe, while we let the others slip by, both the fine days when we hurt and the rainy days when we felt perfectly well. The brain wants a pattern. It finds one, and after that every rainy day with pain reinforces it once more.
I am not saying this to contradict anyone. I say it because it helps to know that our memory is a poor measuring tool for this kind of thing, mine as much as anyone else’s.
Where a signal was found after all
Now for the second half of the answer, which is the part usually skipped by articles that only want to debunk the myth.
In 2019 NPJ Digital Medicine published the results of a British study with a lovely name, “Cloudy with a Chance of Pain”. For several months more than 2,600 people with chronic pain logged on their phones every day how much they hurt, and the app matched each entry to the weather where they actually were rather than to a regional average. That changes the quality of the measurement.
This time a link did appear. Days with high humidity, low pressure and stronger wind came with slightly more pain. The effect was small, and temperature on its own explained almost nothing. Humidity was the most consistent factor.
Both are true, each in its own way. If you count doctor visits, the weather is nowhere to be seen. If you ask people with chronic pain day after day how much they hurt, it shows up a little.
Why it is true for some people and not for others
A third study makes clear why the two results do not actually clash. In 2022 the same British team published a reanalysis of the same data in Pain Reports. This time they stopped looking for an average effect that holds for everyone and looked at each person separately instead.
What came out explains a great deal. The response to weather varies hugely from one person to the next. Some people have a clear link between weather and pain, others have the opposite one, and most have none at all. When you average across everyone, the effects cancel each other out and seem to vanish.
So if you feel your back hurts more when the weather turns, you are not necessarily wrong. It may well be that in your case the link is real, even though it cannot be seen across the whole population. What does not work is the reverse: the fact that you feel something does not mean everyone does.
What actually happens when it gets colder
There is one more thing tied to the weather without really being about pressure and humidity, and it is the one I see most often in people.
When it turns cold and wet, life changes. You go out less, move less, and spend more time sitting down and more time indoors. Muscles that do not move tighten up, and a back held crooked for 10 hours a day will hurt whatever the barometer says. On top of that comes the cold, which makes the muscles less supple in the morning, plus the habit of hunching up when we feel chilly.
This is the good news in the whole article, because this part can be changed. You cannot move the atmospheric pressure. How much you move on an October day is up to you.
What you can do on the days it hurts more
Nothing complicated and nothing expensive:
- Keep moving, even if the weather outside is bad. Prolonged bed rest makes mechanical back pain worse, it does not help it.
- Warm up before, not after. A warm shower or 5 minutes of gentle movement in the morning matters more than any ointment.
- Wear an extra layer over the area that hurts, even at home.
- Break up sitting every 30 or 40 minutes, even if only for 2 minutes on your feet.
- Keep a simple diary for 2 weeks, scoring your pain from 1 to 10 alongside that day’s weather. It is the only way to find out whether the link really exists in your case.
- Go to bed at roughly the same times, because poor sleep lowers your pain threshold.
The diary is the thing I ask for most often, because it is something we can read together. Someone who brings me 2 weeks of notes tells me far more than someone who tells me it has hurt ever since the weather changed.
When it is not the weather
Back pain that comes and goes with the seasons is usually mechanical. However, there are signs that call for a doctor and not a weather explanation. I will name those plainly.
- Pain that travels down the leg, with numbness or weakness in the calf or foot.
- Loss of bladder or bowel control.
- Pain that wakes you at night and does not ease in any position.
- Fever, unexplained weight loss, or pain that started after a blow or a fall.
- Pain that lasts more than 6 weeks without shifting at all.
Any of these means investigation, not manual therapy. I have seen some of them put off for months with the explanation that it was the weather, and that delay cost people dearly.
Where Bowen therapy fits into all this
Let me start with what it does not do. It does not change the weather, it does not make your back immune to the cold, and it does not replace tests when any of the signs above are present.
What it can help with is muscle tension, which is exactly what tightens when you move less and sit more, and Bowen therapy works gently on the muscles and fascia, with no manipulation and no force, backed by evidence that is limited and modest. I have taken that evidence apart study by study in the article on back and neck pain and in the one on what the studies show, because I would rather you read the numbers than simply take my word for it.
The order holds in autumn too. First we find out what is wrong, then we see what helps. If the answer is that you need a consultation or a test, I will tell you so, even if it means you leave without booking anything.
Sources
- Jena A. B., Olenski A. R., Molitor D., Miller N., Association between rainfall and diagnoses of joint or back pain: retrospective claims analysis, BMJ, 2017, 359: j5326. PubMed
- Redelmeier D. A., Tversky A., On the belief that arthritis pain is related to the weather, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1996, 93(7): 2895–2896. PubMed
- Dixon W. G., Beukenhorst A. L., Yimer B. B. et al., How the weather affects the pain of citizen scientists using a smartphone app, NPJ Digital Medicine, 2019, 2: 105. PubMed
- Yimer B. B., Schultz D. M., Beukenhorst A. L. et al., Heterogeneity in the association between weather and pain severity among patients with chronic pain: a Bayesian multilevel regression analysis, Pain Reports, 2022, 7(1): e963. PubMed
This article is for information and does not replace a medical consultation. Do not stop or change a prescribed treatment without talking to the doctor who prescribed it.