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"In 2006, a study of nearly 3,000 nurses with breast cancer found that women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women wi
by dejb 18y ago
"In 2006, a study of nearly 3,000 nurses with breast cancer found that women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women with 10 or more friends."
You could always argue that there was a common cause to both the lack of friends and the lack of survival. Perhaps you'd call it a 'life force' until you worked out the details. Perhaps there is a gene that manifests as both solitude seeking and reduced survival options.
Whatever the case I think a lot of people would prefer articles like this to at least mention that there are other possibilities rather than spending time on fluffy and frankly uninteresting anecdotes.
- Ardit20 18y agoYou seem to be in denial although your point about correlation not meaning causation is well taken. However if we take the case of smoking we may say smoking does not cause cancer it only seems to be an ingredient which is found when people die of cancer. I mean technically correlation does not imply causation, but practically in some cases as the one the article is talking about it kinda does. Sure enough there might be something else which causes people to seek friends and that very same thing causes people to die earlier, however what we know is that having friends is a good thing and it seems they prolong your life. Now the way I formulated the last sentence it sounds like correlation but really it implies causation.