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posted by on Wednesday April 19 2017, @11:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the psychosomatics-unite dept.

For more than two thousand years people have believed that joint pain could be triggered by bad weather, but the link has never been proven.

But now, by harnessing the power of thousands of volunteers, doctors hope to unravel the mystery. And the new technique could offer countless solutions to a whole host of ailments.

[...] Each day she enters information about how she feels into an app on her phone, the phone's GPS pinpoints her location, pulls the latest weather information from the internet, and fires a package of data to a team of researchers.

On its own Becky's data is of limited interest, but she isn't acting alone. More than 13,000 volunteers have signed up for the same study, sending vast quantities of information into a database - more than four million data points so far.

The app, called "Cloudy with a Chance of Pain" is part of a research project being run by Will Dixon. He is a consultant rheumatologist at Salford Royal Hospital and has spent years researching joint pain.

My rheumatism is triggered when the wife asks me to carry heavy, heavy things up to our 3rd-floor walk-up...


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 19 2017, @08:54PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 19 2017, @08:54PM (#496542) Journal

    It is easy to notice the correlations you want to see and dismiss the ones you don't.

    Also, if you have pain you are aware of it and give it thought. You take note of it. You remember it the next day or after the weather has changed. If you don't have pain, you don't notice that. Most people don't think about a lack of pain.

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    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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