lefties die younger

From: dino@euclid.colorado.edu (dino)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: doomed left handers
Date: 8 Mar 1995 04:00:27 GMT

Costing the net hundreds, if not *thousands* of dollars to send to
machines everywhere, in article <3jh41s$jjq@agate.berkeley.edu>
ssusin@econ.Berkeley.EDU (Scott Susin) cackles:

>From the FAQ:
>
>>Fb.Left-handed people have shorter life spans than righties.
>
>Why is this listed as false?  It could just as easily be listed
>as Tb.
>
>This theory has been put forward by Stanley Coren in _The Left-Hander
>Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness_.  Coren
>is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.
>
>I searched a medical database, and found that Coren has some critics,
>but also supporters.  I don't have either the time or the qualifications



All quotes (indented) are from an article titled "Life for lefties: from 
annoying to downright risky" from December 1994 _Smithsonian_, cited under 
fair use or plagiarism, whatever. All pytos mine.

    ...

   "Lefties Die Nine years Earlier," world headlines gasped in 1991, when
   psychologists Stanley Coren and Diane Halpern published their findings.
   Left-handers have a shorter life span, not because a world prone to
   right-handers makes lefties more accident-prone, but because the
   physiology of many left handers makes them more susceptible to
   disease. ...

   ...

And here's my favorite pop theory behind left-handedness; I couldn't
resist including it:

   Neurobiologist William H. Calvin suggested that early human mothers
   carried their babies in their left arms, close to the soothing
   rhythms of of the heart, leaving their right hands free for throwing
   rocks at rabbits. ...

   ...

(comments on why left-handers must work so hard to overcome biases deleted)

Coren claims that adjustments to a right-handed world ultimately kill
many lefies; he also claims that lefties are five time as likely to
die in accidents and injuries, as the right-handed world will not
accomodate them. The article has no sources for these figures.

   Coren didn't start out aiming to be the Cassandra of the sinistral
   world. ... he first became intrigued with laterality while studying
   perception in the 1970s. Over the years he noticed something odd:
   although 13 percent of the population of 20-year olds were left-handed,
   only 5 percent of the 50-year olds were, and 1 percent of the
   octagenarians. Where were the old left-handers?

Then the article then talks about how in 1988 how Coren and Diane Halpern,
a psychologist at California State University in San Bernadino, analyzed 
the life spans of 2,271 baseball players, from *The Baseball Encyclopedia*. 
They found that, on average, right-handers live eight months longer than
lefties, a small but notable difference. However, it was their 1991 study,
which was reported in a five-paragraph letter to the *New England Journal
of Medicine*, that made Coren and Halpern anathema among left-handers.

   They polled relatives of 2,000 people in Southern California who had
   died recently, asking if the deceased was left-handed. The researchers
   tabulated a mean age of death for right-handers at 75; for left-handers
   at 66 -- a difference of nine years! ... "Don't wait for Lefty," a _New
   York Times_ article announced, "He's dead." ...

Other researchers dispute this, the article claims. They say that the
sample was too small to be reliable, and anyone who has read _How to Lie
with Statistics_ by Darrell Huff knows about this stuff: studies depend
upon how many are polled, how the info is gathered, and how much time the
study covers, and a couple zillion other things. No follow-ups on why
Alf Landon should of beat FDR in the 1936 election, please. It continues:

   ... Marcel Salive, an epidemiologist at the National Institute on Aging,
   ran numbers from a six-year study of elderly Bostonians through the computer
   and came to the conclusion that death rates were almost the same for
   lefties and righties.  The lack of aged lefties, Salive speculates, may 
   well be due to switching in the early part of the century.

(my note: forcing lefties to write right-handed, for example)

   "That's the first thing we thought of," Coren counters, noting that the
   percentage of lefties has proved constant throughout the centuries,
   despite cultural pressure to switch. But he admits the nine-year
   difference may be off base; a more recent British study of mortality
   rates among cricket players found a two year gap, a numer Coren says sounds
   reasonable. Coren and Salive can agree that the question of lefty life
   span deserves a closer look.

But the question remains: how much do right-handed tools kill lefties?
Later we have:

   ... Calls to the occupational Safety and Health Administration and a soup
   of other federal agencies charged with tracking health and safety
   turned up no evidence of maimed or dying lefties. On the other hand,
   officials admit that this may be because they never ask if accident
   victims are left-handed. The major labor unions, from the AFL-CIO to
   the United Auto Workers, also report no complaints from suffering
   sinsitrals.

And on the "lefties are forced to use right-handed tools" routine:

   ... "We make a conscious effort to make tools ambidextrous," says
   Douglas Spranger, president of Human Factors Industrial Design Inc.,
   a New York City firm that has invented hundreds of specialized hand
   tools, from sugical staplers to a new mascara wand for Lancome. "Left-
   handers are 15 percent of our target market. Every maufacturer is
   concerned with it. But, Spranger concedes, "We [designers] tend to
   favor the right-handed user. Notice the numerical keypad on your
   computer. It's not on the left."

Elsewhere the article claims that lefties suffer from a higher incidence
of specific health problems, including learning disabilities, depression,
migraine, allergies and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritus
and ulcerative colitus. It also has weird theories as to why which I 
won't quote.

Conclusions?  Maybe there is truth here, but as a math geek, I don't trust
the statistics, or the social aspects that influence the results leading to
such conclusions. I'm logging off to go throw some rocks at a few rabbits. 

dino "ambidextrous as a child, and forced into right-handedness" m.

"... when the sharp-tongued Benjamin Disraeli, so the story goes, was
ordered in the last century to withdraw his declaration that half of
the cabinet were asses. `Mr. Speaker, I withdraw,' was Disraeli's
response. `Half the cabinet are not asses.'"

                       --  seen in the Boulder _Daily Camera_, 2-26-95


January 25, 1995