The Nocebo Effect

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

The Nocebo Effect

Postby Username » Mon Apr 20, 2009 4:07 pm

~
Watch this commercial, and tell me how you would feel if you happen to be taking Celebrex at the time.

Celebrex Ad

*******

Washington Post

The Nocebo Effect: Placebo's Evil Twin

By Brian Reid
Special to The Washington Post

Tuesday, April 30, 2002


Ten years ago, researchers stumbled onto a striking finding: Women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn't hold such fatalistic views.

The higher risk of death, in other words, had nothing to with the usual heart disease culprits -- age, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight. Instead, it tracked closely with belief. Think sick, be sick.

That study is a classic in the annals of research on the "nocebo" phenomenon, the evil twin of the placebo effect. While the placebo effect refers to health benefits produced by a treatment that should have no effect, patients experiencing the nocebo effect experience the opposite. They presume the worst, health-wise, and that's just what they get.

"They're convinced that something is going to go wrong, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Arthur Barsky, a psychiatrist at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital who published an article earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association beseeching his peers to pay closer attention to the nocebo effect. "From a clinical point of view, this is by no means peripheral or irrelevant."

Barsky's target is drug side effects, which cost the U.S. health system more than $76 billion a year, according to a 1995 University of Arizona study. If even a small percentage of those costs are caused by patient expectations of harm, addressing the nocebo effect could save a nifty sum.

But convincing doctors that their patients' problems may be more than biochemical is no simple trick. The nocebo effect is difficult to study, and medical training leads doctors to seek a bodily cause for physical ills.

"Nocebos often cause a physical effect, but it's not a physically produced effect," said Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs who studies the ways that expectations influence what people experience. "What's the cause? In many cases it's an unanswered question."

Looking for Trouble

The word nocebo, Latin for "I will harm," doesn't represent a new idea -- just one that hasn't caught on widely among clinicians and scientists. More than four decades after researchers coined the term, only a few medical journal articles mention it. Outside the medical community, being "scared to death" or "worried sick" are expressions that have long been part of the popular lexicon, noted epidemiologist Robert Hahn from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Is such language just hyperbole? Not to those who accept, for example, the idea of voodoo death -- a hex so powerful that the victim of the curse dies of fright. While many in the scientific community may regard voodoo with skepticism, the idea that gut reactions may have biological consequences can't be simply dismissed.

"Surgeons are wary of people who are convinced that they will die," said Herbert Benson, a Harvard professor and the president Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston. "There are examples of studies done on people undergoing surgery who almost want to die to re-contact a loved one. Close to 100 percent of people under those circumstances die."

But the nocebo effect can lead to more subtle outcomes as well.

Fifteen years ago, researchers at three medical centers undertook a study of aspirin and another blood thinner in heart patients and came up with an unexpected result that said little about the heart and much about the brain. At two locations, patients were warned of possible gastrointestinal problems, one of the most common side effects of repeated use of aspirin. At the other location, patients received no such caution.

When researchers reviewed the data, they found a striking result: Those warned about the gastrointestinal problems were almost three times as likely to have the side effect. Though the evidence of actual stomach damage such as ulcers was the same for all three groups, those with the most information about the prospect of minor problems were the most likely to experience the pain.

Despite the smattering of doctors' anecdotal reports and a few modest clinical studies, research on the phenomenon has not been robust, mostly for ethical reasons: Doctors ought not to induce illness in patients who are not sick.

Changing ethical standards have made it difficult to even repeat some of the classic nocebo experiments. In one century-old effort, conducted long before anyone thought up the word nocebo, doctors set an allergy sufferer wheezing by showing an artificial rose, proving that at least some aspect of the allergic response is stimulated by visual cues. In a study from the early 1980s, 34 college students were told an electric current would be passed through their heads, and the researchers warned that the experience could cause a headache. Though not a single volt of current was used, more than two-thirds of the students reported headaches.

Medical Distrust

But resistance to in-depth study of the nocebo effect rests on more than ethical reservations, said the CDC's Hahn. Belief, he said, does not have a strong place in the anatomy-centered world of modern medicine.

"The fact is that phenomena that essentially come down to what people believe are conceptually difficult in our medical system," Hahn said. "Health is thought to be a biological phenomenon. More psychosomatic elements are hard to deal with."

Science is wearing away at the wall between mind and body. With the aid of high-tech imaging devices, neurologists are getting better at taking pictures of the brain in action. In one blinded study last year, researchers found that patients with Parkinson's disease given a placebo released a brain chemical called dopamine, just as the brain exposed to an active drug would do.

That flood of brain chemicals, it appears, has everything to do with what the mind expects. In most cases, like the Parkinson's study, the outcome is positive -- the placebo effect in action. But for some patients -- depressed, wary of medication or worried about drug side effects -- getting a prescription filled is an angst-ridden experience. And such patients appear even more likely to exhibit those side effects.

Barsky has even sketched out a profile of the kind of patient likely to experience the nocebo effect -- worse side effects and poorer outcomes -- on a given drug. When Barsky sees a patient with a history of vague, difficult-to-diagnose complaints who is sure that whatever therapy is prescribed will do little to battle the problem, he says, those low expectations are inevitably met. The treatments usually fail.

"Whether you trust your doctor or not probably makes a huge difference in whether you report side effects, but there's almost no data on that," Barsky said. He hopes to include information about a person's psychology in an upcoming placebo-controlled clinical trial to see if patients with a particular outlook on life fare better or worse than other subjects.

Far more esoteric factors may also shape both the placebo and nocebo response. A Dutch study, for example, found that most people considered red and orange pills to be stimulating, with blue and green-colored pills more likely to have a depressant effect.

"One of the most important things about a pill is [its] color," said Daniel Moerman, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who has studied the placebo and nocebo effects across different cultures. "That seems to be fairly widespread."

But the mind is a funny thing, and generic responses to color go just so far in explaining the placebo or nocebo response. Consider this: In Italy, Moerman says, blue placebos made excellent sleeping pills for women but had the opposite effect on men.

The apparent reason? "The Italian national football team's color is azzurri," he said. "Blue."

Brian Reid is a Washington area freelance writer.

*******

[url=http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/03/prime-time-pushers]Prime Time Pushers
Freed from federal restrictions, pharmaceutical companies are flooding television with ads for prescription drugs. What does it mean for our health care when serious medicine is marketed like soap?
—By Lisa Belkin
Mother Jones March/April 2001 issue[/url]
~
Username
 
Posts: 794
Joined: Tue Nov 07, 2006 5:27 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Mon Apr 20, 2009 7:27 pm

Trying to short circuit the bottoming out of public opinion with the meme that 'thinking happy thoughts is good for you.'

This propaganda campaign is one of the main anchors of capitalist/fascist psyops.

It was deployed around 1995-96 in anticipation of the ohmygawd-awareness about global warming from the 1997 Kyoto Agreement.


:D :D :D :shock: :D :D :D :D :D :D :D
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!
User avatar
Hugh Manatee Wins
 
Posts: 9869
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2005 6:51 pm
Location: in context
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby cptmarginal » Mon Apr 20, 2009 9:27 pm

That commercial was hilarious.

So perfect to depict a living world made out of words, especially in this context of "nocebos"
The new way of thinking is precisely delineated by what it is not.
cptmarginal
 
Posts: 2741
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:32 pm
Location: Gordita Beach
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Nocebo Effect

Postby monster » Mon Apr 20, 2009 10:56 pm

Username wrote:~
Watch this commercial, and tell me how you would feel if you happen to be taking Celebrex at the time.


What a reassuring commercial - at least it's "never been taken off the market".

Thanks for the fascinating article. One of these days the mainstream will make the switch from seeing mind as a function of body, to body as a function of mind.
"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."
User avatar
monster
 
Posts: 1712
Joined: Thu Aug 11, 2005 4:55 pm
Location: Everywhere
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby Username » Tue Apr 21, 2009 6:07 am

~
Humira Commercial

These ads need to be taken off the air.
~
Username
 
Posts: 794
Joined: Tue Nov 07, 2006 5:27 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Nocebo Effect

Postby MinM » Tue Apr 21, 2009 2:05 pm

Drug Companies and Doctors

We look at two sides of the debate over whether close ties between doctors and drug companies compromise patient care. Our guests are Dr. Jerome Kassirer, Distinguished Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and author of “On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health,” and Dr. Tom Stossel, Director of Translational Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
http://www.hereandnow.org/shows/2009/04/rundown-415/
Username wrote:They're convinced that something is going to go wrong, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Arthur Barsky, a psychiatrist at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital who published an article earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association beseeching his peers to pay closer attention to the nocebo effect. "From a clinical point of view, this is by no means peripheral or irrelevant."

Barsky's target is drug side effects, which cost the U.S. health system more than $76 billion a year, according to a 1995 University of Arizona study. If even a small percentage of those costs are caused by patient expectations of harm, addressing the nocebo effect could save a nifty sum...

This is timely in light of a confluence of these factors in the ongoing treatment/mistreatment of my mother-in-law. Through the years she's been prescribed drugs for a number of seemingly unrelated ailments.

Her most recent diagnosis though fit all the symptoms exhibited by another family member. That case turned out to be pernicious anemia. Pernicious anemia actually would account for a number of symptoms that her numerous doctors have prescribed medicine for over the years.

The rub is that she has great insurance and actually seems to enjoy the attention she receives each time something else inevitably pops up. While at the same time it stands to reason the her doctors have a disincentive to find the root cause of her condition, which could be easily, and inexpensively treated with B12 shots...
Medical Distrust

In the case referenced above the opposite is true. The patient is way too deferential to the medical professionals.
[url=http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/03/prime-time-pushers]Prime Time Pushers
Freed from federal restrictions, pharmaceutical companies are flooding television with ads for prescription drugs. What does it mean for our health care when serious medicine is marketed like soap?
—By Lisa Belkin
Mother Jones March/April 2001 issue[/url]
~

Amen.
Earth-704509
User avatar
MinM
 
Posts: 3286
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2008 2:16 pm
Location: Mont Saint-Michel
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby MinM » Thu Apr 23, 2009 12:39 pm

Earth-704509
User avatar
MinM
 
Posts: 3286
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2008 2:16 pm
Location: Mont Saint-Michel
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby MinM » Sun May 03, 2009 1:22 pm


Doctor questions value of vaccines | CourierPostOnline.com | Courier-Post
By LAVINIA DeCASTRO • Courier-Post Staff • May 3, 2009
Image
The ongoing swine flu epidemic may have you wishing you had taken that flu shot this season, but some doctors say you may be better off without it.

"Since the 12th century, the most commonly used treatment for a cold or the flu is chicken soup," said Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, one of the guest speakers at the U.S. Autism & Asperger Association's regional conference on Saturday at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cherry Hill. "If you think we have anything more sophisticated now, think again."...
<link>
Earth-704509
User avatar
MinM
 
Posts: 3286
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2008 2:16 pm
Location: Mont Saint-Michel
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby Avalon » Sun May 03, 2009 3:16 pm

"Among the diseases that have virtually disappeared are measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis and whooping cough and vaccines are not available to prevent any of them, [Dr. Mayer]Eisenstein said."
http://www.courierpostonline.com/apps/p ... /905030339

Then those parents who question the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine (the P in the DPT shot given to infants) must be silly geese, because whooping cough has "virtually disappeared" and there "isn't" a vaccine available for them to protest.

Whooping cough, (though often not identified as such) is a frequent cause of prolonged cough in adults, even those with childhood immunizations (I still had the receipt of mine from the Fifties). The characteristic whoop is not usually present in adult cases. My children and I had it a few years ago. We think we picked it up from a neighbour child who had not been immunized for it, after his older sister had had a dangerous reaction to her immunization. It was going around our county. Ten weeks of being incredibly sick, with coughing so severe the kids were vomiting afterward and I'd be shaking and weak and unable to move for a full hour after a coughing fit.

Similarly, while tuberculosis is not as widely spread as it used to be, it still is around, especially in poorer areas. Some varieties have become immune to the usual drugs. There are some medications that effect the immune system which require a TB test a couple of times a year.
User avatar
Avalon
 
Posts: 1529
Joined: Tue Jun 21, 2005 2:53 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby Penguin » Mon May 04, 2009 5:20 am

Similarly, while tuberculosis is not as widely spread as it used to be, it still is around, especially in poorer areas. Some varieties have become immune to the usual drugs. There are some medications that effect the immune system which require a TB test a couple of times a year.


Yup, like right over the border in Russia, especially prisons, the resistant tubi strains are already quite common - http://www.scientificamerican.com/repor ... -in-russia
"Multidrug Resistant Tuberculosis in Russia

Merrill Goozner traveled to Siberia to find out if rising rates of MDR-TB in Russia can be curbed"
Penguin
 
Posts: 5089
Joined: Thu Aug 23, 2007 5:56 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby MinM » Wed May 06, 2009 5:32 pm

Big Pharma tries to sugar the pill

The pharmaceuticals industry needs to rebuild its image with a public sceptical of science and genetically modified crops, and at Bayer they are trying to do just that

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009 ... ndustry-gm

Bayer is investing €650m this year on research and development for the division, of which a third goes to environmental impacts, part of an increased overall €2.9bn research budget. Bayer has set its store by a "second green revolution" after the agricultural advances of more than 30 years ago...
Earth-704509
User avatar
MinM
 
Posts: 3286
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2008 2:16 pm
Location: Mont Saint-Michel
Blog: View Blog (0)

Postby §ê¢rꆧ » Wed May 27, 2009 7:51 am

The science of voodoo: When mind attacks body

13 May 2009 by Helen Pilcher

New Scientist issue 2708

Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local witch doctor, who wafted a bottle of unpleasant-smelling liquid in front of his face, and told him he was about to die and that no one could save him.

Back home, Vanders took to his bed and began to deteriorate. Some weeks later, emaciated and near death, he was admitted to the local hospital, where doctors were unable to find a cause for his symptoms or slow his decline. Only then did his wife tell one of the doctors, Drayton Doherty, of the hex.

Doherty thought long and hard. The next morning, he called Vanders's family to his bedside. He told them that the previous night he had lured the witch doctor back to the cemetery, where he had choked him against a tree until he explained how the curse worked. The medicine man had, he said, rubbed lizard eggs into Vanders's stomach, which had hatched inside his body. One reptile remained, which was eating Vanders from the inside out.

Great ceremony

Doherty then summoned a nurse who had, by prior arrangement, filled a large syringe with a powerful emetic. With great ceremony, he inspected the instrument and injected its contents into Vanders' arm. A few minutes later, Vanders began to gag and vomit uncontrollably. In the midst of it all, unnoticed by everyone in the room, Doherty produced his pièce de résistance - a green lizard he had stashed in his black bag. "Look what has come out of you Vance," he cried. "The voodoo curse is lifted."

Vanders did a double take, lurched backwards to the head of the bed, then drifted into a deep sleep. When he woke next day he was alert and ravenous. He quickly regained his strength and was discharged a week later.

The facts of this case from 80 years ago were corroborated by four medical professionals. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that Vanders survived. There are numerous documented instances from many parts of the globe of people dying after being cursed.

With no medical records and no autopsy results, there's no way to be sure exactly how these people met their end. The common thread in these cases, however, is that a respected figure puts a curse on someone, perhaps by chanting or pointing a bone at them. Soon afterwards, the victim dies, apparently of natural causes.

Voodoo nouveau

You might think this sort of thing is increasingly rare, and limited to remote tribes. But according to Clifton Meador, a doctor at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who has documented cases like Vanders, the curse has taken on a new form.

Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame - yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. "He didn't die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer," says Meador. "If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying."

He didn't die from cancer but from believing he was dying of cancer
Cases such as Shoeman's may be extreme examples of a far more widespread phenomenon. Many patients who suffer harmful side effects, for instance, may do so only because they have been told to expect them. What's more, people who believe they have a high risk of certain diseases are more likely to get them than people with the same risk factors who believe they have a low risk. It seems modern witch doctors wear white coats and carry stethoscopes.

The nocebo effect

The idea that believing you are ill can make you ill may seem far-fetched, yet rigorous trials have established beyond doubt that the converse is true - that the power of suggestion can improve health. This is the well-known placebo effect. Placebos cannot produce miracles, but they do produce measurable physical effects.

The placebo effect has an evil twin: the nocebo effect, in which dummy pills and negative expectations can produce harmful effects. The term "nocebo", which means "I will harm", was not coined until the 1960s, and the phenomenon has been far less studied than the placebo effect. It's not easy, after all, to get ethical approval for studies designed to make people feel worse.

What we do know suggests the impact of nocebo is far-reaching. "Voodoo death, if it exists, may represent an extreme form of the nocebo phenomenon," says anthropologist Robert Hahn of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, who has studied the nocebo effect.

Life threatening

In clinical trials, around a quarter of patients in control groups - those given supposedly inert therapies - experience negative side effects. The severity of these side effects sometimes matches those associated with real drugs. A retrospective study of 15 trials involving thousands of patients prescribed either beta blockers or a control showed that both groups reported comparable levels of side effects, including fatigue, depressive symptoms and sexual dysfunction. A similar number had to withdraw from the studies because of them.

Occasionally, the effects can be life-threatening (see "The overdose"). "Beliefs and expectations are not only conscious, logical phenomena, they also have physical consequences," says Hahn.

Nocebo effects are also seen in normal medical practice. Around 60 per cent of patients undergoing chemotherapy start feeling sick before their treatment. "It can happen days before, or on the journey on the way in," says clinical psychologist Guy Montgomery from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Sometimes the mere thought of treatment or the doctor's voice is enough to make patients feel unwell. This "anticipatory nausea" may be partly due to conditioning - when patients subconsciously link some part of their experience with nausea - and partly due to expectation.

Catching

Alarmingly, the nocebo effect can even be catching. Cases where symptoms without an identifiable cause spread through groups of people have been around for centuries, a phenomenon known as mass psychogenic illness. One outbreak (see "It's catching") inspired a recent study by psychologists Irving Kirsch and Giuliana Mazzoni of the University of Hull in the UK.

They asked some of a group of students to inhale a sample of normal air, which all participants were told contained "a suspected environmental toxin" linked to headache, nausea, itchy skin and drowsiness. Half of the participants also watched a woman inhale the sample and apparently develop these symptoms. Students who inhaled were more likely to report these symptoms than those who did not. Symptoms were also more pronounced in women, particularly those who had seen another apparently become ill - a bias also seen in mass psychogenic illness.

The study shows that if you hear of or observe a possible side effect, you are more likely to develop it yourself. That puts doctors in a tricky situation. "On the one hand people have the right to be informed about what to expect, but this makes it more likely they will experience these effects," says Mazzoni.

Catch 22

This means doctors need to choose their words carefully so as to minimise negative expectations, says Montgomery. "It's all about how you say it."

Hypnosis might also help. "Hypnosis changes expectancies, which decreases anxiety and stress, which improves the outcome," Montgomery says. "I think hypnosis could be applied to a wide variety of symptoms where expectancy plays a role."

Is the scale of the nocebo problem serious enough to justify such countermeasures? We just don't know, because so many questions remain unanswered. In what circumstances do nocebo effects occur? And how long do the symptoms last?

It appears that, as with the placebo response, nocebo effects vary widely, and may depend heavily on context. Placebo effects in clinical settings are often much more potent than those induced in the laboratory, says Paul Enck, a psychologist at the University Hospital in Tübingen, Germany, which suggests the nocebo problem may have profound effects in the real world. For obvious reasons, though, lab experiments are designed to induce only mild and temporary nocebo symptoms.

Real consequences

It is also unclear who is susceptible. A person's optimism or pessimism may play a role, but there are no consistent personality predictors. Both sexes can succumb to mass psychogenic illness, though women report more symptoms than men. Enck has shown that in men, expectancy rather than conditioning is more likely to influence nocebo symptoms. For women, the opposite is true. "Women tend to operate more on past experiences, whereas men seem more reluctant to take history into a situation," he says.

What is becoming clear is that these apparently psychological phenomena have very real consequences in the brain. Using PET scans to peer into the brains of people given a placebo or nocebo, Jon-Kar Zubieta of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, showed last year that nocebo effects were linked with a decrease in dopamine and opioid activity. This would explain how nocebos can increase pain. Placebos, unsurprisingly, produced the opposite response.

Meanwhile, Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin Medical School in Italy has found that nocebo-induced pain can be suppressed by a drug called proglumide, which blocks receptors for a hormone called cholecystokinin (CCK). Normally, expectations of pain induce anxiety, which activates CCK receptors, enhancing pain.

Ultimate cause

The ultimate cause of the nocebo effect, however, is not neurochemistry but belief. According to Hahn, surgeons are often wary of operating on people who think they will die - because such patients often do. And the mere belief that one is susceptible to a heart attack is itself a risk factor. One study found that women who believed they are particularly prone to heart attack are nearly four times as likely to die from coronary conditions than other women with the same risk factors.

Despite the growing evidence that the nocebo effect is all too real, it is hard in this rational age to accept that people's beliefs can kill them. After all, most of us would laugh if a strangely attired man leapt about waving a bone and told us we were going to die. But imagine how you would feel if you were told the same thing by a smartly dressed doctor with a wallful of medical degrees and a computerful of your scans and test results. The social and cultural background is crucial, says Enck.

Meador argues that Shoeman's misdiagnosis and subsequent death shares many of the crucial elements found in hex death. A powerful doctor pronounces a death sentence, which is accepted unquestioningly by the "victim" and his family, who then start to act upon that belief. Shoeman, his family and his doctors all believed he was dying from cancer. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nothing mystical

"Bad news promotes bad physiology. I think you can persuade people that they're going to die and have it happen," Meador says. "I don't think there's anything mystical about it. We're uncomfortable with the idea that words or symbolic actions can cause death because it challenges our biomolecular model of the world."

Perhaps when the biomedical basis of voodoo death is revealed in detail we will find it easier to accept that it is real - and that it can affect any one of us.


The overdose

Depressed after splitting up with his girlfriend, Derek Adams took all his pills... then regretted it. Fearing he might die, he asked a neighbour to take him to hospital, where he collapsed. Shaky, pale and drowsy, his blood pressure dropped and his breaths came quickly.

Yet lab tests and toxicology screening came back clear. Over the next 4 hours Adams received 6 litres of saline, but improved little.

Then a doctor arrived from the clinical trial of an antidepressant in which Adams had been taking part. Adams had enrolled in the study about a month earlier. Initially he had felt his mood buoyed, but an argument with his ex-girlfriend saw him swallow the 29 remaining tablets.

The doctor revealed that Adams was in the control group. The pills he had "overdosed" on were harmless. Hearing this, Adams was surprised and tearfully relieved. Within 15 minutes he was fully alert, and his blood pressure and heart rate had returned to normal.

It's catching
In November 1998, a teacher at a Tennessee high school noticed a "gasoline-like" smell, and began complaining of headache, nausea, shortness of breath and dizziness. The school was evacuated and over the next week more than 100 staff and students were admitted to the local emergency room complaining of similar symptoms.

After extensive tests, no medical explanation for the reported illnesses could be found. A questionnaire a month later revealed that the people who reported symptoms were more likely to be female, and to have known or seen a classmate who was ill. It was the nocebo effect on a grand scale, says psychologist Irving Kirsch at the University of Hull in the UK. "There was, as far as we can tell, no environmental toxin, but people began to feel ill."

Kirsch thinks that seeing a classmate develop symptoms shaped expectancies of illness in other children, triggering mass psychogenic illness. Outbreaks occur all over the world. In Jordan in 1998, 800 children apparently suffered side effects after a vaccination and 122 were admitted to hospital, but no problem was found w[/color]ith the vaccine.[/color]


http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... ?full=true
User avatar
§ê¢rꆧ
 
Posts: 1197
Joined: Sun Sep 23, 2007 4:12 pm
Location: Region X
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Nocebo Effect

Postby conniption » Sun Sep 19, 2021 6:19 pm

off-guardian
(embedded links)

Covid-19: Fear, Anxiety and Voodoo Death

Ryan Matters
Sep 18, 2021


Death counters, case counters, faulty tests to inflate death numbers, footage of patients on ventilators, apparent corpses on the streets in Wuhan, and highly transmissible “variants”.

What do all these things have in common? They cause fear and anxiety. They are devices used to not only weave a narrative but to instill a belief in people’s minds of a new and dangerous disease.

As will become evident, this incessant fear-porn can be likened to a form of “black magic”, causing suffering and death in its own right, which, as well shall see, is a curious yet well-documented and very “real” phenomenon.

VOODOO DEATH

The concept of “voodoo death” or “psychic death” has been observed for hundreds of years. It is a phenomenon whereby a person (often a member of a tribe or primitive community) is brought to death by means of a “spell”, or the use of “black magic”. This phenomenon has been observed by anthropologists, doctors and explorers all over the world, in areas such as Australia, New Zealand, Africa, South America and Haiti.

We will now review some of the testimonies recorded by Cannon (1942), starting with that of Dr. D. M. Lambert, a member of the Western Pacific Health Service of the Rockefeller Foundation, who claimed to have observed several cases of men dying from fear. Dr. Lambert recounts a specific incident that happened in Queensland, Australia, involving one Dr. Clarke. Note that “Kanakas”, a rather offensive term, refers to Pacific Islanders employed by British colonies during the 19th and 20th centuries.

[Dr. Lambert] wrote to me concerning the experience of Dr PS Clarke with Kanakas working on the sugar plantations of North Queensland. One day a Kanaka came to his hospital and told him he would die in a few days because a spell had been put upon him and nothing could be done to counteract it. The man had been known by Dr. Clarke for some time. He was given a very thorough examination, including an examination of the stool and the urine. All was found normal, but as he lay in bed he gradually grew weaker. Dr. Clarke called upon the foreman of the Kanakas to come to the hospital to give the man assurance, but on reaching the foot of the bed, the foreman leaned over, looked at the patient, and then turned to Dr. Clarke saying, “Yes, doctor, close up him he die” (i.e., he is nearly dead). The next day, at 11 o’clock in the morning, he ceased to live. A postmortem examination revealed nothing that could in any way account for the fatal outcome.”


In the Australian aboriginal culture, the concept of “sorcery” is a prominent one, and each member of the tribe has recourse to its use by which he may harm an enemy. The medicine man (the healer) is the only one capable of countering such dark influences and is thus deemed the most important member of the community. In aborigine culture, “bone pointing” is the most powerful form of black magic employed, said to have brought death to many a man. Indeed, there are numerous cases of “death by bone pointing” in the literature.

"Dr. J. B. Cleland, Professor of Pathology at the University of Adelaide, has written to me that he has no doubt that from time to time the natives of the Australian bush do die as a result of a bone being pointed at them, and that such death may not be associated with any of the ordinary lethal injuries.”


Cannon also relays a testimony given by Leonard (1906), in connection with his observations of tribes of the Lower Niger region:

"I have seen more than one hardened old Haussa soldier dying steadily and by inches because he believed himself to be bewitched; no nourishment or medicines that were given to him had the slightest effect either to check the mischief or to improve his condition in any way, and nothing was able to divert him from a fate which he considered inevitable. In the same way, and under very similar conditions, I have seen Kru-men and others die in spite of every effort that was made to save them, simply because they had made up their minds, not (as we thought at the time) to die, but that being in the clutch of malignant demons they were bound to die.”


Cannon then reviews the work of Warner (1941) who worked among primitive aborigines in Northern Australia. Warner identified two distinctive movements of the social group that occurred during the process when black magic sorcery became effective on the victim.

The first was a contraction whereby the people around the victim withdrew their support. In other words, the “bewitched” person’s social structure collapsed, his friends and family no longer remained by his side, and he was left isolated and alone.

The “bewitched” individual being isolated from the rest of the community, left alone to endure their fate which has been all but decided? Does this not conjure up images of the elderly in care homes, isolated and alone, told they are being threatened by a ‘deadly’ virus, and nobody is allowed to see them? I would argue it’s the same mechanism at work here. Cannon goes on to consider the general features of reported “voodoo deaths”.

"There is the elemental fact that the phenomenon is characteristically noted among aborigines-among human beings SO primitive, so superstitious, so ignorant that they are bewildered strangers in a hostile world. Instead of knowledge they have a fertile and unrestricted imagination which fills their environment with all manner of evil spirits capable of affecting their lives disastrously. […] Associated with these circumstances is the fixed assurance that because of certain conditions, such as being subject to bone pointing or other magic, or failing to observe sacred tribal regulations, death is sure to supervene.”


Cannon emphasizes the primitiveness and ignorance of such individuals who have succumbed to “voodoo death” and implies that humanity has evolved to be immune from such influences. But is that really true? It could be argued that our modern society is no different from the primitive tribesman, except that we have substituted “evil spirits” for another invisible enemy.

The covid-19 phenomenon has seen the development of a “covidian cult”, with its members obeying senseless “tribal regulations” such as mask-wearing, “social distancing”, mRNA vaccination and the obsessive use of sanitizers.

Seen in this context, the modern-day covidian cult member is no different from the primitive tribesman. He is just as ignorant and just as suggestible. And therefore, he is entirely at the mercy of the sorcerer and his black magic, bone pointing ritual (think positive PCR test).

Dr SD Porteus, studied primitive life extensively in the Pacific Islands and Africa and found that social interaction was of key importance for primitive peoples in rendering themselves resistant to all manner of mysterious and malicious influences. Of course, man’s need for social interaction is well-known, a need (as well as a right) which for many people has been left unfulfilled. Cannon ends off by discussing the power of fear and how it affects one’s physiology.

"Fear, as is well known, is one of the most deeply rooted and dominant of the emotions. Often, only with difficulty can it be eradicated. Associated with it are profound physiological disturbances, widespread throughout the organism. There is evidence that some of these disturbances, if they are lasting, can work harmfully.”


He then delves into an explanation of how emotions can impact the sympathico-adrenal system, which, as a consequence of prolonged activation, can cause a major drop in blood pressure, something observed frequently among soldiers during World War One.

The physiological effects of prolonged stress, anxiety and fear are well-known to be destructive and yet this has been downplayed during the last 18 months. Finally, Cannon ends his exploration of “voodoo death” with the pronouncement of its legitimacy.

"The suggestion which I offer, therefore, is that “voodoo death” may be real, and that it may be explained as due to shocking emotional stress-to obvious or repressed terror.”


Seen in this context, excess deaths in communities subjected to the covid terror campaign (i.e. with increased access to the internet, TVs, radios, etc) may be considered inevitable, or at the very least, explainable, without the need for a pathogenic agent.

Lester (1972) noted cases in which members of a community were “hexed” and subsequently refused to take in food or water, leading to their eventual demise. He argued that this represented a type of “death by suggestion” – a psychological program so persuasive as to affect the individual’s behavior to the point of irrationality. He also argued that “voodoo death” occurred not only in primitive, superstitious and ignorant “savages” but also in more “advanced” societies.

Needless to say, irrational behavior has been one of the hallmarks of the covid scam. Think about restaurants where people enter wearing a mask only to take it off when they sit down at the table. Think of the sanitizers outside shops and malls, the cheap temperature guns from China, the cloth masks with gaping holes in them.

None of it makes logical sense and it’s not meant to. All of these things serve a purpose, which is to establish rituals and “tribal regulations”, that when broken instill fear and anxiety. ‘I forgot to put my mask on when I went outside, what if the virus made its way into my mouth? Oh God, will I get sick? Am I going to die?’

Finally, Lester also notes the work of Engel (1968) who explored the question of why people fall ill when they do and what kind of psychological state induces disease symptoms in the body. Engel discovered a consistent pattern of responses which he named the “giving up-given up complex” and found that a person responding to stress with such a complex was more likely to fall ill and even die.

Lester then uses this model as a way to conceptualize “voodoo death” and its mechanism of occurrence, maintaining that the cause was localized in the psychological state of the individual.

THE “PLACEBO EFFECT”

In modern times doctors use the terms “placebo effect” and “nocebo effect” to refer to the phenomenon that occurs when a patient’s beliefs cause his illness to either improve or worsen. According to research, the “placebo effect” accounts for most (if not all) of the benefits of antidepressants – a staggering conclusion considering that millions of people around the world are prescribed these dangerous drugs every year.

One then has to wonder why doctors feel it is OK to risk brain fog, suicide, vomiting, insomnia and the myriad other “side effects” that can be caused by these drugs when a similar benefit can be achieved by the use of sugar pills.

The power of the mind and its ability to affect miraculous healings represents one of the most incredible breakthroughs ever made in the history of medicine and yet it has been grossly ignored by the mainstream establishment. Why? Because it doesn’t fit into the belief box of materialist science, nor does it suit the profit-driven pharmaceutical establishment.

The power of the subconscious mind in influencing health has been detailed extensively by psychiatrist and spiritual teacher, Dr. David Hawkins, PhD. In his book, Healing and Recovery, he writes that:

"Often a certain illness gets notoriety on television because a celebrity shares their experience of it. That is followed by an epidemic of that illness because of suggestion. The mind buys into the program, the belief system and the specificity of a certain disease.”


In expanding on the power of the mind, Hawkins maintained that when we buy into a belief, we give it the power of the collective energy of that belief. He thought that this was a powerful factor involved in ‘epidemic’ scenarios where large numbers of people fall ill with similar symptoms.

Using AIDS as an example, Hawkins constructed a framework whereby fear-laden media triggers the release of unconscious guilt from the psyche, which, driven by negative emotions manifests in the body as disease.

Indeed, Hawkins’ views regarding illness were rather interesting, maintaining that unconscious guilt, negative emotions and belief in the specificity of disease were the three main factors involved in the onset of illness. He said of the AIDS phenomenon:

"What better disease to bring up all of man’s feelings of sinfulness and guilt, especially about one’s sexuality, which is so common in all cultures, not just ours? [..] What better area to create an epidemic to ensure the belief in it? There is the unconscious guilt, not to mention the conscious guilt about one’s sexuality, the sadness about it, the grief over it, and the fear about the disease itself. All this contributes to setting the stage for a mental belief system…”


THE POWER OF INTENTION

The so-called “placebo effect” represents the power of one’s intention in influencing and shaping reality. Though materialist science implies that the world is random and without meaning, that is far from the truth. In actuality, each one of us, as conscious beings, plays an active role in the evolution of the primordial “beingness” from which we all stem. We all have a purpose and a part to play.

Though I am no scientist, I have read enough about modern physics to understand that, at its core, our reality is probabilistic. In other words, the future is never certain. And most empowering of all is the realization that we have the power to influence those probabilities by focusing our intention.

By allowing ourselves to buy into the fear, we become like the naive tribesman who, unaware of his personal power and at the mercy of his own beliefs, sets his intention to die. Unknowingly, he has directly altered the set of probabilities that will determine his future and all that is left to do is wait for the wave function to collapse.

What kind of reality will you create?
_______

Ryan Matters is a writer and free thinker from South Africa. After a life-changing period of illness, he began to question mainstream medicine, science and the true meaning of what it is to be alive. Some of his writings can be found at newbraveworld.org, you can also follow him on Twitter and Gab.

REFERENCES

Cannon WB. “Voodoo” death. American Anthropologist, 1942;44(new series):169-181. Am J Public Health. 2002 Oct;92(10):1593-6; discussion 1594-5.

Lester, D. (1972). Voodoo Death: Some New Thoughts on an Old Phenomenon. American Anthropologist,74(3), new series, 386-390. Retrieved August 22, 2021.

Garrity TF. Psychic Death: Behavioral Types and Physiological Parallels. OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying. 1974;5(3):207-215.


comments

https://off-guardian.org/2021/09/18/cov ... doo-death/
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Nocebo Effect

Postby Harvey » Mon Sep 20, 2021 6:53 am

Image
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
User avatar
Harvey
 
Posts: 4165
Joined: Mon May 09, 2011 4:49 am
Blog: View Blog (20)

Re: The Nocebo Effect

Postby stickdog99 » Mon Sep 20, 2021 5:04 pm

I can't help but wonder just how much the supposed lower hospitalization and death rates for vaccinated people has to do with doctors', nurses' and patients' intensely held belief that the vaccines these patients were injected with confer them with significant protection against the worst effects of COVID-19.

And I can't help but wonder how many people have died or suffered debilitating long terms effects due to the nocebo effects of 24-7 COVID-19 fear porn.
stickdog99
 
Posts: 6303
Joined: Tue Jul 12, 2005 5:42 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Next

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Elihu and 46 guests