Why would someone who is lonely refuse help they clearly need?
The research excerpts provided do not cover why a lonely person might refuse help. The corpus does cover the relationship between social disconnection and healthcare engagement, which shows two simultaneous patterns. Social disconnection predicts lower uptake of preventive services, such as cancer screenings and vaccinations. However, it also predicts a higher volume of care contact, including more physician visits, urgent care use, and telemedicine use. This is described as high demand meeting unmet need. The corpus also addresses how people process social information. While a single study suggests a null finding for whether negative social cues capture attention, other research supports that loneliness is associated with an altered interpretation of social messages once they are received. Furthermore, in studies of community trust, mistrust can be transmitted through social networks rather than the network only buffering against it. A systematic review by Valtorta (2018) cautions that current evidence does not support the view that older patients with lower social support place greater demands on ambulatory care once health status is accounted for.