Biometeorology: What It Is and How It Affects Our Health

Ahallmark of holistic medicine is that its practices take into account an individual’s total internal, social, and external environment when consider ing disease prevention and treatment. The interdisciplinary science of biometeorology studies the effects of weather and cl imate on organisms’ adaptation mechanisms and the consequences of human and natural impacts on the atmosphere. Although the late University of Maryland Professor Helmet Landsberg, who is considered the father of modern climatology, wrote a landmark text on the subject in 1969,1 only recently has broader attention been focused on this discipline in the United States. In Europe, biometeorology has been used for more than a decade to provide publ ic heal th information. For example, the national German weather service offers, to the public,2 and to doctors and medical facilities, area-specific advisories about conditions that may aggravate arthritis, depression, and respiratory and other health problems.3 The British National Health Service is pilottesting the use of weather reports to predict its workload.4,5 Hippocrates had anticipated the contention of biometeorologists and bioclima to logis ts that human bodies are hardwired to react to weather cues; circa 400 BC, this father of modern medicine wrote: “South winds induce dullness of hearing, but, if the north winds prevail, coughs, infections. . .occur.”6 According to Laurence S. Kalkstein, Ph.D. , direc tor of the Univers i ty of Delaware’s Center of Climatic Research in Newark, “we’ve known that weather affects organisms for 100 years or more. The real breakthroughs today are due to the fact that we have computers that allow us to evaluate much more data.”2 This article focuses on what science is discovering about environmental influences on health and how this knowledge may be utilized in disease prevention, integrative treatment, and public health planning.