The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills

Madrigal talks about how Hmong people’s “powerful cultural belief in night spirits” killed them. They believed in the supposed evils of sleep paralysis so strongly that when they experienced the paralysis, otherwise known as “‘out of sequence’REM state,” they literally died of fear. Fascinating.

Another facet of the article about the opposite of placebo effect, also known as nocebo, is also interesting:

Her argument amounts to a stirring and chilling case for the power of the nocebo, the flipside to the placebo effect. While placebo studies have grown in importance, the nocebo effect has not been studied well in scientific literature, in part because of the ethical issues involved in deliberately doing something that might harm people. Limited studies suggest that it is real and it is powerful.

The sheer amount of evidence for placebo (and even possibly nocebo) reminds me just how much we underestimate the amount of power we wield over our own bodies.