Did the "nocebo" effect play a huge role in the events of the past few years?

People can get ill just because they expect to become ill.

My attention was recently drawn by this and susequent tweets (sorry Elon - I am still going to use that word), which echoed some of my recent thinking along these lines:

Have we dramatically underestimated the role of negative propaganda in generating people’s symptoms of illness during the 2020 Great Human Rights Heist.¹

I am going to write an article (or more) on this, but I just wanted to share a couple of fascinating cases mentioned in this article (click pic below), which I am still wading through:

Firstly, in 2007 this article was published. It described the case of a 26 year old man who overdosed on his clinical trial medication. He presented to his hospital with very low blood pressure.

This article describes the event in more detail:

Several years ago, a published case study describes a 26-year-old man who was taken to the emergency room. After arguing with his ex-girlfriend, he attempted suicide by swallowing 29 capsules of an experimental drug that he obtained from a clinical trial that was testing a new antidepressant. When he arrived at the hospital, he was sluggish, shaking, and sweating and had rapid breathing. His blood pressure was extremely low at 80/40, and his pulse was 110.

Doctors were successful at raising his blood pressure. Over the course of four hours, they injected him with 6 liters of saline solution. His blood pressure increased to 100/62, which is at the lower end of the normal range, but his pulse remained high at 106.

What finally cured the patient wasn't anything the emergency room staff did. Instead, a doctor from the clinical trial arrived at the hospital. He told the patient that those antidepressant pills weren't antidepressants because he had been randomized into the control arm of the trial. Yes, that's right: He overdosed on placebos.

Oh.

Within 15 minutes, the patient's blood pressure stabilized at 126/80, and his heart rate dropped to a perfectly normal 80 beats per minute.

This is the “nocebo” effect in action. What it illustrates is that psychological factors can have profound physiological effects.

The second story I wanted to cite here was described in this Smithsonian article:

The schools fell like dominoes across Portugal in May 2006, one after another calling upon government officials with reports of dozens, then hundreds of students struck with rashes, dizziness and difficulty breathing, just as year-end exams approached. Was it a mysterious allergic reaction, a chemical spill, a virus? After digging deeper, medical practitioners came up with a new culprit: “Strawberries With Sugar,” or in Portuguese, “Morangos com Acucar.” No, not the food—the vector for this disease was a popular teen soap opera with a saccharine title. Just before the outbreak in the real schools, a similar, life-threatening illness had plagued the teenaged characters in their fictional school.

The Portuguese students weren’t suffering from a virus or allergies: they’d come down with mass psychogenic illness.

Note again that the psychogenic illness caused a rash as well as difficulties breathing.

That’s all I am going to say about this for now as I am still getting into the topic, other than to point out that it seems obvious that social media and the internet - not just through the connectivity they create, but also through the algorithms which push people to the extremes of belief systems - are capable of hugely magnifying the effects described.

With grateful thanks to Natasha Forder for her links on “X” which inspired me to write this.

1. BTW I am experimenting with attempting to banish the words “covid” or “pandemic” from my lexicon, replacing it with this - a brilliant phrase thought up by

Jessica Hockett