In 1982, at a nursing station in the frozen Canadian town of Davis Inlet, a young medical student made a troubling observation about arthritis.
“On the north coast of Labrador, let me tell you, the weather is terrible — you could have a snowball fight in the middle of July,” recalled Dr. Donald Redelmeier, who is now a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. “There are days of extreme and severe weather, but there is no epidemic of osteoarthritis. … Yeah, people are suffering, but not much different from what I was used to in downtown Toronto.”
