When I was in high school, I played mixed doubles on the school badminton team. Given that I played a sport that’s relatively unpopular in Western culture, I wasn’t too surprised when I found out early on that our practices were relegated to 6 am in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays, roughly between the months of January and March. After school practices and better conditions in the spring, summer, and fall were reserved for basketball, volleyball, and other more popular sports. Meh.

This translated to getting up at 5 am in the morning, groggy and deprived of sleep, putting on my dad’s huge parka, and shoveling through 20 inches of snow on a relatively big driveway. Somewhere between the snow shoveling and the rigorous practices and many sweaty wristbands later, moderate arthritis on my right arm developed. Since then, I have had a “sixth sense” about the weather, often being able to sense when it’s going to rain cats and dogs by assessing the dull ache and throbbing on my wrist and lower arm. Obviously it wasn’t the most accurate predictor, but whenever it did warn me, I felt better prepared to nurse an impending flare-up. For me, an arthritis flare-up is often associated with the weather of the day.

And arthritis is not the only condition where flare-ups can be affected by the weather. Studies show that other chronic conditions such as migraine and asthma can experience flare-ups due to weather conditions, when the perfect cocktail of temperature, humidiy, barometric pressure, and other weather factors is met.

So my interest was peaked during last night’s 6 o’clock news, when CTV did a quick piece on MediClim®.

MediClim® is a warning system that calculates upcoming weather conditions and determines when flare-ups will occur for specific chronic conditions. By subscribing, people with chronic conditions such as arthritis, asthma, migraine, diabetes, and heart disease will receive an e-mail 24 hours ahead, warning them of the potential risk of a flare-up due to upcoming weather changes that will affect your condition. You can even add it to your Facebook. What a great way for technology to improve the quality of our health!

Canadian doctor John Bart and Canadian meteorologist Denis Bourque developed this system, which divides weather conditions into 14 categories affecting various health conditions. And for sufferers of chronic conditions and diseases, every little bit helps. Talk to your doctor about how to prepare for an impending flare-up.

Sounds too good to be true? This is a free service that I’ll definitely be signing up and checking out. And I’m sure we will be hearing more about this innovation!

My question - do any of you subscribe to MediClim®, and if so, what are your thoughts?