The nocebo effect can be contagious as in cases of mass hysteria.
2. A negative placebo effect: Nocebo can take place when patients taking medications experience adverse side-effects unrelated to the specific pharmacological action of the drug.
The nocebo effect is associated with a person's prior expectations of adverse effects from treatment as well as with conditioning in which the person learns from prior experiences to associate a medication with certain somatic symptoms. Anxiety and depression often lead to the nocebo effect.
3. Etymology: Latin, meaning "I will harm"; an adverse, nonspecific side effect occurring in conjunction with a medication but not directly resulting from the pharmacologic action of the medication.
The term is purposely similar to placebo.
The nocebo effect versus the placebo effect
Over the years, researchers have found that some people who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as those with similar risk factors who didn't believe in such fatalistic concepts.
- The higher risk of death apparently was not related to the usual heart disease causes; such as, age, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, etc.
- The risk seemed to be closely related to what a person believed; that is, "think sick, be sick!"
- While the placebo effect refers to health benefits produced by a treatment that should have no effect, patients experiencing the nocebo effect presume (think) the worst, health-wise, and that's just what they get.
- When people are convinced that something is going to go wrong, it is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Convincing doctors that their patients' problems might be more than biochemical is not easy to accomplish because the nocebo effect is difficult to study and to verify so medical training tends to lead doctors to look for a bodily cause for physical ailments.
- The word nocebo, Latin for "I will harm", doesn't represent a new idea, but just one that hasn't caught on widely among modern clinicians and scientists.
- Scientific research seems to be getting more information about the mind and the body by utilizing the pictures of the brain in action with high-tech imaging devices..
- In one recent study, researchers found that patients with Parkinson's disease given a placebo released a brain chemical called dopamine, just as if the brain were exposed to an active drug.
- The number of brain chemicals seems to have everything to do with what the mind is anticipating.
- Like the Parkinson's study, the outcome is positive with the placebo effect.
- Some patients who are depressed, wary of medication, or worried about drug side effects; just getting a prescription filled results in anxieties and such people osten appear even more likely to show those side effects.
- The mind is not understood sufficiently to appreciate its strong influence on how the body responds, but the reality of how much the mind affects the body, and the body the mind, is becoming more obvious.
See placebo for the antonym of nocebo.
The term nocebo; Latin for "I will harm", was chosen by Walter Kennedy, in 1961, to indicate the counterpart of one of the more recent applications of the term "placebo" which means, "I will please", namely that of a placebo being a drug that apparently produced a beneficial, healthy, pleasant, or desirable consequence in a subject, as a direct result of that subject's beliefs and expectations.