Health Care Blog July 30, 2024
In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy boldly declared that our country has a “loneliness epidemic.” In the Surgeon General’s public health advisory, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” he draws on decades of empirical evidence demonstrating the tremendous toll that loneliness has on people’s quality of life, and how it also increases the risk of premature death by 26%.
The question is: What can be done to tackle this intractable public health crisis? Perhaps even more pointedly, what is anybody actually doing that successfully reduces loneliness?
Steps Required to Reduce Loneliness
The first thing we have to do, as the Surgeon General said in his report, is “consistently and regularly track social connection using validated metrics.” Without ongoing measurement,...
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