Pressure-Induced Pains - Fact or Fiction?

johnstein asks: "Sure, everyone knows that person who is always blaming their aches and pains on the weather, be it Gramps and his knee, Aunt Edna with her arthritic hands, or *that* guy at work who swears his big toe begins to throbs whenever it's going to rain. Ok, maybe I am one those people too. I've had exactly TWO migraine-class headaches in the past month: the evening of August 9th and the afternoon of August 17th. Googling produced a very useful website that provides historical weather data. After a bit of searching I found this chart that clearly shows similar barometric trends for the days in question (barometric pressure near 30 inches and rising). Is this just a coincidence? My googling suggests that while some believe the human body is highly sensitive to weather changes, others claim that the minute changes in barometric pressure would unlikely be a cause for pain in the head or joints. While stress, eating habits, and general lifestyle might be a more likely candidate, can weather claim some of the blame as well?"

Comments

Need a little more data

[Otter]

I'm no stats genius and the least publishable unit for medical journals is pretty low but before you go submitting this to JAMA:

1) n=2 is a pretty minimal data set. You'd probably want some more data points -- or at least you would if the subject weren't yourself.

2) The fact that 100% of your headaches occur with air pressure of ~30 and rising would be more remarkable if it weren't ~30 and rising every other day in that area. I'd estimate the significance of your discovery at p = 0.5.