This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Karen Hopkins.

Are you one of those people who can tell when a storm is approaching based on your achy knees?

Well, you may think you are,

but a new study of more than 1.5 million seniors

finds no relationship between rainfall

and doctor visits for pain.

The results are in the British Medical Journal. The idea that our bodies are

barometers for all sorts of weather-related phenomenon, including changes in temperature,

pressure, and precipitation, is not a new one.

Hippocrates himself actually partially this idea in nearly 400 BC.

Anupam Jena, a physician and expert in health care policy at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts

General Hospital, who led the study.

If you talk to people, I'd say millions and millions of people probably believe that things like

rainfall influence symptoms of joint pain and stiffness.

But if you look at the studies, there's actually been surprisingly little evidence to suggest that is true.

Most of the studies have been quite small and we were interested in

thinking about whether we could approach this question in a big data sort of way.

He and his colleagues looked at information collected in more than 11 million

visits that older Americans made to their primary care physicians.

They compared these records with data on daily rainfall,

and they asked,

...