Manipulating a dial on a clock-like face that was twice the size of his head, Joseph Hollander was standing outside a vault-like door an instrument array at his fingertips. In his knee-length white coat, he could have been mistaken for a mad scientist.
Hollander actually was a prominent physician, and he was orchestrating one of most-extraordinary experiments in medical history.
Hollander suffered from arthritis, and he was an ardent believer that weather conditions worsened his pain — a belief shared these days by as many as 75% of arthritis patients.
Hollander knew a thing or two about the condition. He was one of the world’s pre-eminent arthritis specialists, and he set out to prove the weather-pain connection once and for all.
His plan centered on controlling the uncontrollable – the weather.
Enter the “Climatron.”
It was a contraption out of a science fiction novel, evoking the Golden Age of Hollywood horror movies. Under his supervision, a hermetically sealed apartment akin to a submarine was constructed inside the Rehabilitation Building of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, in Philadelphia.
The reinforced concrete structure was equipped with beds, easy chairs, and a bathroom; more or less a comfortable studio apartment, with a 270-square-foot combination bedroom/living room. The builder was one of the nation’s premiere climate-control companies, Charles S. Leopold Inc. The firm had designed air-conditioning systems for the U.S. Capitol, Madison Square Garden, and the New York Stock Exchange.
With Hollander at the controls, a master of the universe, the weather inside the Climatron couldn’t have been better – at least when his subjects checked in, two at a time. The temperature was 76 degrees Fahrenheit, the air dry and scrubbed clean, with no trace of pollutants.
Armed with specific instructions, the subjects were to spend two to four weeks in the Climatron. Four times a day each one was to take, and then note, the body temperature, along with the timing, location, and intensity of any joint stiffness or pains. The patients took blood-pressure and pulse readings twice daily, and were required to measure and weigh their intake and output of fluids.
After waiting five to seven days to allow the participants to adjust to life in the Climatron, Hollander began varying the controls.
And did he ever vary them.
Hollander subjected the patients to changes in humidity that were within ranges of what one might experience in a Philadelphia spring.
The variations in pressure decidedly were not.
A word about barometric pressure
Fluctuations in pressure, or the weight of the air, have been – and remain — prime suspects in exacerbating arthritic pain.
Pressure is measured by barometers that literally weigh the air. “Barometric pressure” may be an esoteric concept these days to the general public, but it is a sine qua non in weather forecasting. Whether pressure is rising or falling – the air getting heavier or lighter — is an important clue about what’s coming. Precipitation forms when air rises and its water vapor condenses in the colder, higher atmosphere. Thus, when a storm is approaching, the air tends to be lighter and more conducive to the lifting.
When the pressure is rising, the air is trending heavier, and that impedes the air parcels from rising.
This may seem counterintuitive: We tend to think the air is “heavy” when it’s cloudy and rainy; just the opposite is true.
Typically, the pressure is expressed in “inches of mercury.” On average the air weighs about 14.7 pounds per square inch, and that weight will force a column of mercury to rise about 30 inches. The readings tend to vary from about 29.5 inches, typical of the pressure at the center of a storm, to 30.5 when it’s dry and sunny. In terms of weight, that would be a variation of 14.4 to 15 pounds per square inch.
While most people don’t feel a thing when pressure moves up or down, the changes may well be a source of torment for some arthritics. One hypothesis holds that the subtle fluctuations in weight can cause tendons or any scar tissue to expand and contract, thus causing pain.
Hollander put that hypothesis to the extreme test. Periodically in four-hour intervals he would lower the pressure from 31.5 inches to 28.5 inches. That would be the equivalent of changing the weight of the air from about 15.4 pounds per square inch to 14 pounds.
He also simultaneously raised the humidity significantly, but, again, rapid changes in humidity are common in the Philadelphia area.
The radical drops in pressure would be the stuff of weather history.
Bombs away
You may be familiar with the term “meteorological bomb.” Which defines a particularly intense storm, invoked most frequently to describe snowstorms. To qualify, the pressure in the vortex of a cyclone has to fall 24 millibars, or about 0.7 inches, in 24 hours. That would be 0.03 inches an hour.
The Climatron rate was better than 0.7 per hour — that would be close to 25 times the criterion for a bomb!
John Gyakum, the McGill University atmospheric scientist who is credited as the cocreator of the term, told me that a Climatron-level pressure drop anywhere on this planet would be unthinkable.
Among the eight with rheumatoid arthritis, within a few hours of the onset of the simultaneous changes, seven experienced “increasing” arthritis pain in a total of 29 of 40 “trials.” The symptoms disappeared rapidly when conditions were returned to normal states.
Success … to a degree
Hollander’s findings spoke to his hypothesis that the changes wrought the discomfort—not the absolute values.
Given the pressure extremes, why the seven didn’t report pain for all 40 of the trials was a mystery. And along with those mixed responses, one mystifying result—and this was the type of cosmic hiccup that has bedeviled the pursuit of connections between the weather and human physiology—was the fact that one of the subjects appeared to be asymptomatic.
Hollander found encouragement in the results and persevered in his grand Climatron experiments for several years. Conflicting results became a leitmotif.
In the end, Hollander concluded, the pursuit had been worth the endeavor. “Despite the innumerable frustrations and hours of wasted effort to achieve data reportable only in a ‘Journal of Negative Results,’” he wrote in 1968, “the ‘old wife’s tale’ that arthritics can predict the weather has been statistically proved.”
I would argue that Hollander’s most important finding was an obvious – and often lost —reality that is at the root of the difficulties in connecting weather directly to health matters. The human body and the nonlinear chaotic system known as the atmosphere meet at one of the most complex intersections in the known universe.
Dr. Hollander by any measure was a brilliant man, even if he didn’t fully understand the atmospheric part.