I was thinking that there must be a population of people that do tend to hum often. If the theory is any good then one might try to identify those members of the humming population and do a study on health/wellness.
The first, second, and third considerations in such a study would be ruling out other directions of causality:
Does having a sore throat make people hum less?
Does being healthy make people happy, and therefore inclined to hum more?
Does humming correlate with being in a choir, which may also cause respiratory diseases to be spread more often (in the absence of precautions)?
Does living in close quarters with lots of other people make them likely to stop you from humming, and also make them more likely to pass diseases onto you?
Does having this happen early in life give you a stronger immune system or at least plenty of immunity to common diseases?
Do certain cultures have attitudes towards humming and also attitudes to hygiene that are causally relevant?
...
I would be extremely, extremely skeptical of any study on the subject other than a randomized intervention.
Yes, I suspect doing any type of study (on this or anything else) should inform on much more than some simple H0 rejected type conclusion. Seems like that type of approach, the narrowly focused one, to inquiries into if relationships exist or not is a sure way of not learning as much or sheding light on knowledge/information that would be available.
I was thinking that there must be a population of people that do tend to hum often. If the theory is any good then one might try to identify those members of the humming population and do a study on health/wellness.
The first, second, and third considerations in such a study would be ruling out other directions of causality:
Does having a sore throat make people hum less?
Does being healthy make people happy, and therefore inclined to hum more?
Does humming correlate with being in a choir, which may also cause respiratory diseases to be spread more often (in the absence of precautions)?
Does living in close quarters with lots of other people make them likely to stop you from humming, and also make them more likely to pass diseases onto you?
Does having this happen early in life give you a stronger immune system or at least plenty of immunity to common diseases?
Do certain cultures have attitudes towards humming and also attitudes to hygiene that are causally relevant?
...
I would be extremely, extremely skeptical of any study on the subject other than a randomized intervention.
Yes, I suspect doing any type of study (on this or anything else) should inform on much more than some simple H0 rejected type conclusion. Seems like that type of approach, the narrowly focused one, to inquiries into if relationships exist or not is a sure way of not learning as much or sheding light on knowledge/information that would be available.