How Loneliness Hurts Your Health

How dangerous is loneliness to your health? 

In this clip from our episode “The Wellness Industry Is Misleading You”, host John Driscoll speaks with Zeke Emanuel about the data linking close friendships to longer life, including research showing significantly higher mortality among those with few close relationships.

Listen to the full episode here

🎙️⚕️ABOUT ZEKE EMANUEL
Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, is the Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, the Co-Director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute, and the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

Emanuel is an oncologist and world leader in health policy and bioethics. He is a Special Advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organization, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  He was the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health and held that position until August of 2011. From 2009 to 2011, he served as a Special Advisor on Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and National Economic Council. In this role, he was instrumental in drafting the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Emanuel also served on the Biden-Harris Transition Covid Advisory Board.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

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Transcript

John: 0:07

But maybe talk about like. The sharpest criticism or, or the, the sharpest warning in your book is about loneliness, and maybe you could talk how, how dangerous is the epidemic of isolation and loneliness in the United States?'cause it, according to the last Surgeon General, not the current one, I don't even know that they've got a doctor as Surgeon General actually anymore. Um. Is that we are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, not just because of COVID, because of media, but how dangerous is being lonely to your health?

Dr. Zeke: 0:40

Oh yeah, the, yeah, I mean the statistics are overwhelming. If you look at the people who have seven or eight close friends, which is sort of the limit of close friends you can have and the people who have, you know, 1.5 or less close friends, statistically, um, the mortality rate is about, uh, 25% more over the subsequent eight years. Um, and there are myriad studies. Beginning with the Harvard Adult Development Study, the sort of longitudinal study that began in the 1930s following Harvard grads, then their spouses and children, uh. Studies in China, studies in Sweden, all come to the same conclusion, which is that people who have friends, uh, and have close friends and visit with them, talk with them, uh, live a lot longer. And it's, uh, astonishingly high. And one of the things I point out in the book, first of all. Having good close friends is good. Now, it's not like you gotta wait for the benefit, uh, long into the future. Like with exercise, it's good now and it's good in the future. And the third benefit is it's good for the other person. It's not just selfishly good, you know, it's good for me, but it's actually, you know, there's an interaction here and the other person is gaining. Benefit. So I think those are all really, really important. And I do think of ve Murti, uh, the Surgeon General under Biden's report on loneliness, uh, and social relations is gonna go down as one of the landmark reports. Uh, yes. And, and you know, so there is this also statistic, which is, uh, uh, brought out, uh, from BBYU of Brigham Young University researchers that. Being lonely is equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And as you point out, John, the trends are terrible. The trends are fewer close friends for, uh, most young people, more eating alone, uh, whether at home or out in restaurants. Uh, less time spent with other people. Um, and all of these are bad indicators and one of the things I say is look. We all need close friends that you know, someone who you can reveal yourself to, who can support you through thick and thin. But the casual social interactions are also wildly important. I mean, literally just the other day we were going out buying bagels and I was just joking. With a guy, uh, who was taking the order and he was joking with me. He says, we, you're your father's son. He says, we're give you gold gilded bagels today

John: 3:13

in.