[escepticos] Dolor artrítico y el tiempo, en Skeptoid

[José María Mateos]

Buenas:

En el episodio de esta semana de Skeptoid, dedicado a responder
preguntas que envían los oyentes (estudiantes, en este caso), sale lo
siguiente:

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Hi Brian, my name is Tim Thielen and I'm a student at the chilly
Chemeketa Community Collage in Salem, Oregon. As the temperature keeps
dropping here I keep hearing people complaining about their arthritis
flaring up. My question is, does temperature really play a role on
arthritis or is that just something that people believe because they
heard that all their life?

At the risk of having everyone with joint pain come after me with
pitchforks and torches, the correct answer is B. Atmospheric
conditions, including temperature, pressure, and humidity, do not
affect the temperature, pressure, or humidity inside the human body.
Thus, there is no plausible way that the weather could impact joint
pain.

Like taking Vitamin C to cure a cold, this is another medical myth
that is so deeply ingrained that it's really hard to shake. For most
of my life I believed my bum knee could predict weather changes. I
thought it worked like a barometer. I was unaware that simply riding
in an elevator produces much greater shifts in atmospheric pressure
than common weather fronts. And so I fell victim to confirmation bias.
You see the weather is almost always changing one way or another, and
whenever my knee happened to hurt, I'd take notice if the weather was
indeed changing. If it didn't, I probably just attributed the knee
pain to the bum knee. Confirmation bias causes us to assign undue
significance to events that confirm our belief, and causes us to
rationalize away any events that don't.

Changes in humidity are even less plausible. Human bodies have very
specific hydration levels. Walking through a sprinkler dramatically
shifts the relative humidity outside your body, but does not affect
your body's internal hydration. Neither does a humid or a dry day. The
synovial fluid inside your joint is the same whether you're in the
desert or the bathtub. If you became dehydrated enough for your
synovial fluid to be affected, you would experience many other more
severe symptoms of dehydration first.

Ice packs and heat packs can, however, be used to alleviate joint
pain. The difference is that these, when applied directly for a period
of time, will change your deep tissue's temperature at the point of
application. However, weather only affects your skin; so long as you
are properly clothed and don't experience hypothermia or hyperthermia,
your body temperature remains unaffected.
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El enlace entero está aquí: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4188

Y lo tengo que dejar aquí, que va a llover en Madrid.

Un saludo.