Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) afflicts approximately 1 in every 100 people, it is 3 times more prevalent in women than it is in men and usually has an onset of symptoms between 40 and 50 years of age though sufferers as young as 15 have been recorded. RA is usually diagnosable through blood tests and like other forms of arthritic disease will not manifest exactly the same in all people who have it.

RA mainly affects the small joints in the body, in our hands, feet and neck but can  affect the larger joints too. RA causes painful swelling in the lining  (synovium) of the joints, often (but not always) producing painful nodules under the skin that can vary in size from a few millimeters to a few centimetres over the bony protruberances of the joints.

RA is an auto immune disease with no definate and definable cause but medical science has establiushed that sufferers tend to have relatives who also suffer from RA. RA is three times more common in smokers, it may be triggered by an immune response to another illness and recent studies suggest that vitamin D deficiency may cause people to be more susceptible to it.

Physical activity is greatly curtailed by a flare up of symptoms which tend to be more intense first thing in the morning for an hour or more. Many sufferers find hot weather particularly distressing and find cooler climates more agreeable. RA increases the risk of cardio vascular disease, anaemia and lung fibrosis.

Part of the difficulty of treating RA is that the drugs used to controll it’s symptoms often have undesirable and confusing side effects. Prednisone for instance can lessen the severity of RA symptoms but prolonged use can cause osteoporosis which can in itself be a consequence of lowered physical activity because exercise is difficult and painful.

In recent times fish oil and krill oil containing omega 3 fatty acids have been found effective in lessening RA symptoms. I have met several people over the years who have claimed that alkaline diets have been helpful in treating their own RA, a therapy that most medical authorities do not recommend whether because they do not think it works or that most people do not have the necessary discipline to strictly follow it.

Gentle massage and joint mobilisation can be helpful in treating the symptoms of RA but. An increasing number of RA sufferers find medical marajuana helpful in making their lives more comfortable which is clearly not a legal option in most countries, for a health practitioner to even suggest it’s use in such places may be a crime in itself.

Meditation can help RA sufferers cope with their disease, it costs nothing and will not make the symptoms worse if it doesn’t work for you.

In more severe cases joint replacement surgery is used when disablement and pain becomes intolerable.

Whether climate change is an acute crisis brought about through human behavior or an as yet little understood natural cycle there will be implications for our health, even the fear of  it can have an effect. The prospect of tropical diseases becoming  active in previously sub-tropical environments is one of the more obvious possibilities not only for people but for plants and animals too, whatever effects our agriculture impacts on us . If we were to properly study how our attempts to control our own environments impacted on our health we may be surprised, air conditioning is a good case in point. Even though air conditioning has been with us for decades now we still have not come up with a system that can be kept germ free past the twenty year mark, keeping hospital infection rates down is difficult for this reason alone. How ironic it was when CFC’s in our refrigerators and airconditioners were found to be effecting our ozone layer.

Long distance air travel often exposes us to sudden climatic change too, perhaps some of what we experience as jet lag may be a bit of climate shock effecting the body in a weakened state from body clock interruption. Climatisation is thought to usually take a healthy adult about two weeks when they travel to a place with a different climate to home. When a person  lives in a cold climate they acquire better immunity (all other things being equal), but lose their extra natural resistance after several weeks in a warmer climate.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) the last two weeks of the current season and first two weeks of the next is called “doyo”, doyo is considered to be like a lunar year (one callender month) of transition from one season to the next. Many herbal, acupuncture and even chi gong practices are oriented to not only observe the current season but the next also, in all five seasons- summer, autumn, winter, spring and doyo* (in four parts).

There are no doubt other traditional medicine practices around the globe that innovatively and effectively deal with severe weather, in Russia for instance kindergarten children are marched bare foot in circles through tubs of icy water just  before winter hits and few children seem to get colds later on.

Maybe too many of us urban dwellers just don’t go outside enough anymore, we now know that not everybody gets enough vitamin D from sunlight so in a sense climate induced disease (and the fear of it) is already with us but we are only starting to notice it. Some urban and city environments because of the orientation of their streets and buildings create some very unpleasant wind tunnel effects and not much sunlight falls to the ground in high rise areas in winter time, making them fashionable climate ghettoes.

I have never had a client ask me to tune them up for the next season with acupuncture but I treat plenty whose problems are in some way connected to climatic factors, even the wind entering your car window on a still day creates a very localised wind that your body can react to, weather is not what it used to be for many reasons.

Heat, whether it comes in the form of an unseasonably hot day in a cooler month, during normal summer weather or as a result of a hot  artificial environments has  health significance in TCM. People are considered to be more accident prone, have headaches more often, suffer “hot-blood” conditions like psoriasis, suffer more from cardiac conditions, febrile diseases and insomnia, when exposed to heat and hot weather.

Psychological illness can be exacerbated in the heat too, people tend to be more manic and excitable when it is hot and crime waves have been known to correspond with heat waves. Many become reckless in the pursuit of having a good time in summer, in TCM summer is the season of accidents. Just as the heat can quicken your pulse, so too do “heat causing” food and drink like alcohol, coffee, chilli, chocolate and drugs that rev you up like ice and speed. In Summer time people are more sociable, venture  into nature and celebrate alot. In Australia more babies are born in August and Serptember than in the other months of the year, in TCM Summer is the season of joy.

People who dislike the heat often have a tendency to suffer from the energy states listed above just as people who prefer summer to winter often find that things like their osteo arthritis and blood circulation worse when it is cold. There is a feature of perceived heat in TCM too, where a “full heat” condition like heat stroke, hyperthyroidism or malaria does raise your body temperature, “empty heat” often does not.

In TCM empty heat is viewed as a condition caused by deficient body fluids rather than a fever, in my time as a nurse I encountered quite a few elderly people who would kick their blankets off and complain of feeling too hot even when the air temperature was not particularly warm.  These poor souls often looked emaciated (due to chronic dehydration) and were flushed across the nose and cheeks (malar flush). They even looked dried out  but would rarely drink water when it was offered, much to the frustrations of the nurses and doctors looking after them.

Empty heat (Yin deficiency) can be experienced by younger people too in the form of AIDS and Lupus. Whether heat is full or empty when you suffer from it it makes it hard to properly relax and be still. Burn out from living a frantic life style for too long is regarded as a heat condition in TCM also.

The five pernicious climates (cold, damp, dryness, wind and heat) interact with each other, heat and damp cause “hot damp” conditions- high humidity during monsoon can literally drive people mad who are not acclimatised to it because the moisture in the air will not allow your sweat to dry and cool you. When cold and wind combine the cold and flu season starts and wind dryness plays havoc with allergy sufferers.

In TCM so long as the transition from one season to the next is gradual rather than sudden and weather extremes do not occur we adapt and are less susceptible to illness.