ABSTRACT
It rains on both the loved and the unloved. At least that is what conventional wisdom among the folk teaches us. Among the folk who work in health care, there is a corollary truism that although both the loved and the unloved are rained upon, it is the unloved who get sick from it. This truism is not as self-evident as the first one, and it has become the subject of scrutiny and examination. The general notion that social support, defined in a number of various ways, relates to health outcomes has become the subject of extensive investigation by a variety of investigators from different disciplines. The specific conjecture that support aids in coping with illness has not been closely inspected. Thus, despite the attention and scrutiny that the general topic has received, some very important critical aspects of it have remained uninvestigated.
