The Real Pain of Climate Change Is Easy to Feel, but Increasingly Difficult to Study

Dawn Gibson can literally feel storms coming in her bones.

“I’ll start feeling like this gnawing and throbbing in my bones and joints,” the 48-year-old suburban Detroiter said. “I get this feeling like my body is getting very heavy, and it’s almost like those old diving suits with the big window in front.”

Imani Barbarin, in Philadelphia, sometimes feels like her pain is better at predicting the weather than the app on her phone.

“It kind of builds; usually I feel it most in the morning the day of [the storm],” the 35-year-old said. “It’ll be like, something’s off, and it’ll be sunny outside, like I don’t get it. Then all of a sudden it’ll just be all cloudy, pouring out rain.”

Gibson and Barbarin are among the more than 50 million Americans who have some form of ongoing, regular pain—the fastest growing chronic condition in America. Gibson suffers from ankylosing spondylitis and fibromyalgia, which both lead to widespread pain throughout the body and overall fatigue, while Barbarin has cerebral palsy. 

And for as long as people have reported recurring pain that doesn’t respond adequately to treatment, they’ve complained about the weather making it worse. Atmospheric changes intensifying pain “is a common complaint among people with persistent pain” said Dr. Corey Simon, associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Duke University, who sees patients coping with it in his practice.

There is a library of studies trying to understand the connection between chronic pain and weather, but no single theory has prevailed in the medical establishment. Nonetheless, patients, clinicians and epidemiologists all agree that weather is a factor in some pain. Now, as climate change slowly remakes weather patterns and atmospheric trends, a new question is emerging: Is global warming increasing the torment of those suffering from chronic pain?

The Agony of a Rapidly-Increasing Chronic Condition

Everyone feels pain, from the immediately sharp, but then dull throb of a stubbed toe, to the searing sting of a cut hand sliced while peeling vegetables or the deep soreness of heavy bruises from a fall down the stairs. While this kind of discomfort can fade quickly, chronic conditions can bring prolonged, often life-long agony that disables many people. Chronic pain both vividly colors and darkens the everyday experience of those who suffer it, according to Barbarin, a disability advocate. 

“A dull ache is kind of like my normal,” she said. “I feel it on my feet all the time. I feel it on my hips, in my back.”

This rise in chronic pain is happening alongside a big increase in autoimmune disorders since 2017, said Dr. Tamiko Katsumoto, clinical associate professor of immunology and rheumatology at Stanford University. The outcome is now that chronic pain is “our most prevalent chronic health condition, number one cause of disability globally, [and] most expensive,” Nicholson said. Half a trillion dollars are spent annually on chronic pain treatments, many of which don’t work. 

Weathering Pain That’s Hard to Study

Elderly osteoarthritis patients often complain that cold, wet conditions make their pain worse, Simon, at Duke University, said. Dr. Sara Wallace, an orthopaedic surgeon and assistant professor at the University of Chicago Medical Center, has seen similar pain triggers in her patients.

“I can say anecdotally that most patients who come to the door, if not all patients with arthritis, will tell you that when the weather changes, when it’s going to rain outside, when it’s going to snow, patients do say that their pain is worse,” she said.

Rain, or stormy weather, is often associated with lower barometric pressure. “If the barometric pressure, for example, outside goes down, then that may allow the joints to swell in the body,” potentially increasing pain, Wallace explained. 

“There’s a lot more variability in day-to-day pressure during winter than summer” in the United States, said Steve Vavrus, Wisconsin State climatologist and assistant director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This could explain the “wet and cold” connection that Simon and Wallace have been observing.

For Barabarin, even weather conditions this mundane can be devastating.

“There are some days where I just become so jumbled up,” she said. “Sometimes I just can’t get my body to cooperate, and that’s not necessarily pain, but it’s also environmentally implied too.”

In a scenario in which the pain occurs in a variety of winter conditions that occur simultaneously—wet, cold, low barometric pressure—it can be hard to identify the meteorological source of pain. Such atmospheric complexities can make research at the intersection of chronic pain and weather even more inconclusive.

As osteoarthritis is a fairly common cause of chronic pain experienced by many older people globally, it’s drawn a lot of research and made people in their sixties a somewhat uniform population to study. But even with consistency among the patients studied, the results vary widely.

U.S.-based researchers in 2007 found that older American patients felt more arthritis pain with high barometric pressure. In 2015, researchers in Northern Europe found that osteoarthritis patients throughout Europe experience worse pain in colder, more humid conditions and barometric pressure had little impact. A study published in 2014 that immersed older adults in cold water found that their pain tolerance decreased when exposed to frigid conditions. But then two Australian studies published in 2016 found that weather had limited impact on chronic musculoskeletal pain in people over 40. 

Timothy McAlindon, a rheumatologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and a co-author on the study focused on Americans, thinks that investigating only the physiological connection between weather and pain is why these studies are not conclusive. He pointed out that people “have their own prior hypotheses” that inform their perceptions of pain.

Psychology, particularly mood and memory, really influences perception of pain related to weather, McAlindon, Wallace and Simon agree. 

“If your mood has been very positive, very high, then you may, generally speaking, experience less pain in your body,” Wallace explained. “Whereas, if your mood is kind of low and maybe you have some seasonal associated depression, maybe you notice that joint pain more.”

Volatile, climate-driven weather shifts can drive mood swings, as well as “climate grief” and “eco-anxiety.” 

Additionally, if the weather has you trapped inside, you lose your ability to exercise, which can help alleviate pain from osteoarthritis, Wallace and Simon both explained.

Exercise is also key to maintaining good mental health. But for many folks with varying degrees of pain and disability, walking outside might be the only form of exercise available to them, Gibson added, and that might become more difficult if climate change brings more heat or precipitation to their community.

The myriad weather impacts on mental health and mood can lead people to fixate on their pain more when the weather is poor, Simon said. Humans have a tendency “to invest in patterns” which can lead to “confirmation bias,” he noted.

“Such biases can lead us to remember pain on poor weather days [rather] than pain on good weather days.” 

A prolonged poor mood can turn into chronic stress, which can make pain worse by triggering the body to release cortisol, which increases inflammation, Katsumoto said.

Collaboration Challenges Hinder Research

Though deeply unsettled, research on chronic pain and weather exists. But studies of chronic pain explicitly related to climate change do not, and atmospheric scientists and epidemiologists seldom collaborate on research into the topic. 

“The data are in different formats,” Vavrus said. “There’s just a different language spoken between the different fields.”

Few of the many weather and pain studies include atmospheric scientists. The research often treats weather as though it’s fixed throughout the day, with few looking at how temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity and precipitation fluctuations over a 24-hour time period might affect pain.

It’s hard to make conclusions “if you only have one data point,” Vavrus said. If these studies did incorporate meteorology as it changes, research might be more robust, but the complex challenges of comprehensively determining what climate change is doing to weather will make figuring out its impacts on pain even more difficult. 

Global warming is bringing more heatwaves and an atmosphere that sucks up more moisture to feed storms. Those thermodynamic effects of climate change often have more clear ties to pain. For example, gout sufferers living in Arizona—which will continue to get hotter and dryer as global temperatures increase—will likely experience worse pain due to more frequent and severe instances of dehydration driven by the increasing temperatures and aridity. That’s on top of the exacerbation of the pain by the heat itself. 

Anna Samson, a 26-year old writer and disability advocate from Toronto, has axial spondyloarthritis (a form of arthritis) and fibromyalgia. When temperatures start getting into the upper 70s, it feels like “the slightest movement takes all the effort in the world,” she said via email. And high humidity can send her literally reeling. 

“[Humidity], in particular, instantly makes me dizzy,” she added. “It feels like running into an invisible wall, and I have to sit or lie down until my head stops spinning.”

“My joints will feel slow and sticky, like they have hot, burning glue inside them,” she said. “It makes everything difficult to do.”

One irony of the warming climate is the possibility that it could bring more polar vortexes of unusually frigid temperatures to otherwise temperate parts of North America. The strength of the polar jet stream that circulates around the Arctic is driven by the North Pole being much colder than the equator. But with the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet, that differential between warm and cold temperatures has decreased. And some scientists have proposed that the polar jet stream is slowing down and starting to wobble like a top that’s about to stop spinning, with its teetering dropping cold, polar air to more temperate, lower-latitude regions like Michigan.

“There’s good theoretical reasons why we would expect that climate change should generally slow down the strength of the westerly polar jet stream,” Vavrus said.

“My joints will feel slow and sticky, like they have hot, burning glue inside them. It makes everything difficult to do.”

— Dawn Gibson

For folks susceptible to cold this is ominous news, and a way climate change impacts on atmospheric dynamics could worsen chronic pain.

Three years ago, Gibson was diagnosed with Raynaud’s syndrome, which causes decreased blood flow to the extremities. In cold weather, such as when frigid Arctic temperatures descend to lower latitudes, this can cause pain and even lead to frostbite—health challenges that Gibson is facing more often than she expected in a warming climate. 

“When we have a polar vortex, I try not to go outside, because there is a very real chance of something bad happening,” she said. 

Torment During and After Tempests

The increasing incidence and severity of climate-driven extreme weather events complicates the lives of those experiencing chronic pain during extreme weather events and also in their aftermath. 

Those pains and the stress of the extreme weather that brought them on pile up into an emotional toll that can also manifest itself physically.

“Our streets were flooded. People lost so many items. It’s emotionally oppressive,” Gibson recalled. “When these big storms come now, or there’s a potential for these big storms, I do feel this terrible dread.”

The looming threats of displacement, loss of valuables or harms to loved ones can spike levels of cortisol, the hormone associated with stress reactions, which increases many forms of chronic pain, Katsumoto said. 

Climate change is also altering when, where and how humans are sickened by infectious disease. Vector-borne illnesses like Lyme disease, dengue fever, chikunguna and malaria have all become more prevalent and widespread as global temperatures warm, a trend that researchers expect to continue. And autoimmune diseases—many of which cause repetitive pain—are “oftentimes triggered by infections,” Katsumoto said.

“Not to mention that autoimmune disease patients are immunosuppressed,” she added, “so they’re going to be more susceptible to infections.” 

Some medications prescribed to treat pain have side effects that can be more dangerous as the climate warms. Gibson takes duloxetine, an antidepressant that also treats chronic pain, but like other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors used to treat depression, the drug substantially reduces the heat tolerance of the people who take it. The increasing frequency, severity and duration of heatwaves make this and similar pain management medications more dangerous to prescribe.

“If you’re on [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors], you can’t live where it’s too hot any longer.” Barbarin warned. “You will die.”

Federal Urgency Wanes as Diagnoses Increase

Autoimmune diagnoses have been rising, in general, even without the potential increases climate change could bring.

“Our wait times have gone up tremendously,” Katsumoto said about healthcare providers who treat rheumatic diseases like arthritis, gout and Lupus. If climate change increases incidents of pathologies that bring chronic pain, it will increasingly stress the healthcare services disabled people rely on, she said. 

All of this comes as the Trump administration is narrowing the research scope of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, key agencies for monitoring chronic illness, Barbarin and Katsumoto said. 

Before the start of the second Trump Administration, funding for pain research at the NIH was about two percent of the agency’s annual research budget. Pain advocates had lobbied Congress for nearly a decade to double that amount, said Christin Veasley, co-founder and director of The Chronic Pain Research Alliance, at a conference in August.

But this past April, the Trump Administration proposed a 40 percent funding cut to the NIH, including terminating the Office of Pain Policy and Planning. That office coordinated chronic pain research activities across the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services, and facilitated both public-facing and Congressional communication on chronic pain research. Advocates worried that without this office, chronic pain research coordination across the NIH and HHS would suffer.

There was, however, hope this summer that those cuts wouldn’t be permanent.

“Some perceived the president’s budget as merely a proposal and others looked at it more of like a policy framework by which they would start negotiating,” Veasley said in August.

While some of the 2025 NIH cuts have been reversed, almost $38 million in pain-related research funding was terminated and around $74 million remains frozen, according to Grant Witness, which is tracking Trump administration cuts to scientific research agencies. These terminated and frozen grants comprise roughly 27 percent of pain-related funding from the NIH. When Inside Climate News asked specifically about the future of the Office of Pain Policy and Planning, the NIH Press Team wrote that “as the [office] was not responsible for conducting or funding research activities, its closure does not impact the scope or continuity of federally supported scientific research.”

But Linda Porter, former director of the Office of Pain Policy and Planning, worries that the office’s closure could upend “decades of progress in enhancing federally funded pain research.”

“The value of NIH research arises not simply from ‘conducting or funding research activities,’ but also from careful evaluation of the current research endeavor, how it benefits the lives of people who it is meant to serve, and how best to move research into the future,” she wrote in response to the Press Team’s statement. “The Office also developed and oversaw training programs for the next generation of researchers, provided networking channels for communication across research disciplines and with people who live with pain.”

Veasley told Inside Climate News via email that the Chronic Pain Research Alliance and other pain advocates “have not gotten any indication that the Office will reopen.” 

Cuts to pain research also coincide with steep reductions in federal climate research funding. 

This year, the number of geoscience grants awarded by the National Science Foundation, which often fund meteorology and climate science, have dropped by 35 percent relative to the yearly average over the last decade. And with the Trump administration targeting federal climate science with budget cuts, staff reductions and the removal of data from federal websites, getting funding from Washington for research at the intersection of global warming and pain is virtually impossible.

As questions about their continued suffering go unanswered by government-supported research, Barbarin said many disabled people are leaning on one another, and using each other’s anecdotes to better understand their conditions. Online forums, like Reddit, provide critical community spaces. The r/ChronicPain subreddit has been around since 2009, and has 87,000 weekly visitors with 4,600 weekly global contributors who often discuss their struggles with their conditions. The number of posts about weather-triggered pain have ticked steadily upwards over the past three years.

“It’s weirdly comforting to realize I’m not alone in this, but also frustrating how much control the weather seems to have over my body,” one contributor wrote. “It’s like a predicting super power,” another user responded about their chronic pain.

For now, sharing their experiences with one another might be the most reliable way forward. 

“When you have something that is a lot unknown, that means you have to live and make your life work while you’re waiting for the science to catch up,” Gibson said.