Men Who Bond with Other Males Prove to be Healthier
Golf and poker night: Cures for heart disease?
Despite the romantic prevalence of so many real or fictional
man-as-solitary-loner archetypes in literature and pop
culture (Henry David Thoreau, the Old Man and the Sea, the
Lone Ranger, etc.), what men truly need in order to be as
healthy as they can be is social interaction – yes, even
rugged, individualist men like the Marlboro man. And now,
there’s credible research that shows just how important
frequent and fulfilling bonding among males really is.
A group of researchers from Sweden conducted a fifteen-year
health study on a pool of nearly 750 men of varying
backgrounds and determined that those with the greatest
amount of social interaction – contact with many friends
they saw on a regular basis – were less than half as likely
to have heart disease, all other factors being equal
(smoking, weight, job-related stress, etc.).
Furthermore, the study’s men who showed the most evidence of
a deep emotional attachment to their friends (not simply
frequency of contact) proved only 58% as likely to DEVELOP
heart disease as their more loner-esque counterparts. These
findings amount to an astonishing reduction in risk – far
greater, I’ll wager, than any prescription drug can credibly
boast.
What does all of this mean? It means your best buddy need
not have dragged you out of a burning building to be saving
your life. It means that your monthly poker night or round
of golf with the boys (or whatever the bunch of you do for
fun) is not only good for your soul – it’s crucial for your
heart and every other aspect of your health, too. Yes, even
if you down a few belts of good scotch or smoke a cigar or
two (especially so, if you ask me) in the course of having
fun.
If anyone in your life thinks otherwise, simply show them
this article, or look up the study itself as proof.
Published in the European Heart Journal (January 2004), the
research offered up no hypothesis as to WHY social
interaction made such a difference in the heart disease risk
of the study’s men, but do we really even need to guess at
the reasons? Isn’t the answer obvious?
Of course it is. Common sense should tell us that the
personal happiness and a sense of belonging we derive from
spending quality time with people of like mind and
sensibilities (friends, in other words) is vital to life -
and to REALLY LIVING – no matter what our sex.
And it takes no high-falutin’ study from Sweden to prove it,
but it was Swede of them to do it.
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Testosterone (and the) blues
You’ve heard me talking about a healthy man’s need to
maintain adequate testosterone levels – especially as we
creep ever upward in age. Not only does this “male hormone”
(women need it too, though) keep us sexually vigorous and
potent, it also helps to keep our bodies strong, straight,
and energetic – and it even helps us to stay mentally
sharp
But now there’s evidence that testosterone also helps to
keep us men from getting the blues, too.
A recent 2-year trial of more than 250 men showed a
statistically significant correlation between testosterone
levels and the incidence of clinically diagnosed depression
in males over age 55. Published in a recent issue of the
Archives of General Psychiatry, the study found that men
with testosterone deficiencies were nearly THREE TIMES AS
LIKELY to be depressed as those with healthy testosterone
levels.
These findings point to the possibility of testosterone
therapy as a possible treatment alternative to the
mainstream’s over-prescribed (and risky) antidepressant
drugs. Whether or not the mainstream will embrace it is
another story
But as far as I’m concerned, anything that keeps
antidepressants out of people’s medicine cabinets is viable
indeed.
Bonding, not desponding,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
