Dr. John Spencer Ellis: Divorced Men Get Two Pieces of Advice, and Both Miss the Point
When a man's marriage ends, the advice arrives fast and it's always the same two items. Get a good attorney. Talk to someone. Both are sound. Neither addresses what the research says is actually happening to him. Nobody says get your bloodwork done . Nobody says fix your wake time before you do anything else . Nobody says count your drinks honestly for two weeks . And those three have mortality data behind them. The case for a third phone call Two independent research teams, using different methods on different datasets, reached the same conclusion. Sbarra and colleagues (2011) pooled 32 studies covering more than six million people and found a hazard ratio of 1.30 for mortality in divorced adults, with stronger effects in men. Shor and colleagues (2012), analyzing 104 studies , arrived at HR 1.30 independently. A systematic review of 7,881,040 individuals found divorced and separated men carried higher all-cause mortality, plus stronger cancer and cardiovascular...