How to protect yourself from damage and the evil eye?
The science of voodoo: When mind attacks body
Helen Pilcher, New Scientist, 13 May 2009
Voodoo in the prism of science: when the mind attacks the body
Translation: InopressaIn modern society, doctors act as sorcerers, causing "damage" to patients, says The New Scientist.
Corruption in archaic societies and this "neowood" have the same roots, according to journalist Helen Pilcher. If a person who enjoys the authority of a patient, be it a magician or a doctor, tells the patient: "The disease is incurable," he dies in due time, even if the diagnosis was erroneous.
However, the history of medicine knows more optimistic stories, the publication notes.
80 years ago, doctor Drayton Dougherty successfully "disenchanted" Alabama resident Vance Wenders, who, after a quarrel with a local sorcerer, was dying in front of his eyes from a mysterious illness. Dougherty told Vance and his relatives that because of the machinations of the sorcerer, a lizard had settled in the patient's stomach, devouring him from the inside. The doctor solemnly injected Vance with a strong emetic and, when the drug worked, he quietly pulled a pre-prepared lizard out of the bag. "The damage has been removed," he proclaimed. A week later, Vance recovered, the author narrates.
Cases of "neowood" are collected by a Nashville doctor, Clifton Meador. So, in the 1970s, a certain Sam Shumen was found to have terminal liver cancer. Shumen died a few months later, as doctors predicted, but the autopsy showed that the tumor was very tiny. "If everyone treats you like you're dying, you start to believe it yourself," explains Midor.
According to the author, the story of Shumen is an extreme expression of a much more widespread phenomenon. "For example, many patients suffering from harmful side effects of medications experience these sensations only because they were warned in advance that this is possible," the author suggests. Moreover, if a person is sure that he is at great risk of contracting a certain disease, he is more likely to get sick with it than someone who is in equally dangerous conditions, but does not know about the risk, the publication claims.
"Through scrupulous experiments, it has been proven that the power of suggestion can strengthen health: this is the most famous placebo effect," the author recalls. But placebo has an evil twin – the "nocebo effect", whose name translates from Latin as "I will do harm". The term "nocebo" appeared only in the 1960s, and the mechanisms of the effect are much less studied than the effect of placebo. "It is difficult to get permission for experiments that are designed to worsen people's well–being," the author explains.
"If death from spoilage does take place, then it is an extreme manifestation of the nocebo phenomenon," says anthropologist Robert Khan, an expert on this effect. In clinical trials of drugs, about a quarter of patients in control groups receiving "pacifiers" experience unpleasant side effects, sometimes no less acute than from real drugs. Sometimes these effects are even life-threatening. About 60% of patients undergoing chemotherapy begin to feel nausea even before the start of treatment.
Sometimes the nocebo effect is contagious, the author writes, referring to cases of mass psychogenic diseases known to doctors for several centuries. Psychologists at the University of Hull (UK) recently conducted an experiment. A group of students were shown samples of air, which, according to the experimenters, contained harmful toxins that cause headache, nausea, itching and drowsiness. Part of the group then breathed this air. Half of the subjects also observed with their own eyes how the woman felt bad after breathing this air. In fact, the air did not contain any harmful impurities, but many of those who breathed it did complain of the described symptoms. The symptoms were most acute in women, especially in those who saw how the "decoy" participant became unwell.
The results of the experiment put doctors in a difficult position: people should be informed about possible side effects, but messages increase the likelihood of such sensations. Psychologists advise doctors to carefully choose words or use hypnosis to reduce anxiety levels, the author notes.
Under what circumstances does the nocebo effect occur and how long do the symptoms last? In a hospital setting, its effect, by analogy with the placebo effect, is often much stronger, says Paul Enk, a psychologist from Tubingen. He proved that in men, the symptoms of nocebo appear more likely due to anticipation of events. Women have the opposite: they are more often guided by their previous experience.
Last year, John-Kar Zubieta from the University of Michigan proved, using the positron emission tomography method, that people who received nocebo reduced the production of dopamine and opioid substances. "From here it is clear how nocebo increases pain," the author notes, saying that placebo, as expected, had the opposite effect. Fabrizio Benedetti from the University of Turin found that the pain caused by nocebo can be relieved by a drug that blocks the receptors of the hormone cholecystokinin. "Usually, the expectation of pain causes anxiety, and the receptors of this hormone are excited," the author explains.
And yet the original cause of the nocebo effect is a person's conviction. "Surgeons are often afraid to perform operations on patients who are afraid of dying – among such patients, deaths are more common," the author notes, referring to Khan's conclusions. Women who are confident that they are at risk of heart failure are almost four times more likely to die from cardiovascular diseases than other women with the same risk factors.
An interesting story happened to a certain Derek Adams, who tried to commit suicide from an unhappy love, the publication reports. He took 29 antidepressant pills, which he participated in clinical trials. Almost immediately, he repented of his decision and went to the hospital, where he felt very ill. And only when Adams was assured that the pills given to him were a dummy, since he was part of the control group, the man immediately went on the mend, the newspaper notes.
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