This Book Can Cause Effects Helen Pilcher’s articles – do you think you’re sick? | | Books on science and nature

Men Roald Dahl’s 1980 masterpiece Pictures of the Twits, Quentin Blake shows how Mrs Twit’s bad behavior eventually took its toll on her character. “If a person has a bad attitude,” wrote Dahl, “it starts to show on the face.”

In her recent book, science writer Helen Pilcher explained this fact: negative beliefs “can exist physically change.” The power of nocebo, as it is known, comes from the Latin word meaning “I will harm”, and it occurs when a person’s negative expectations, either unconsciously or unconsciously, cause illness.

This book can start its effects and make a bold attempt to explore the nature of this phenomenon. In short it can be explained as follows: “when people are warned to expect signs, they are more likely to experience them”. Like impossible advice no thinking about a pink elephant, if you’ve been told that medicine can make you feel nauseous, is a compelling invitation to meet them.

In a study of 231 placebo-controlled clinical trials, Pilcher said that 76% of people in the experimental group reported side effects, compared to 73% of those on placebo. He wrote: “Most of us do funny things in the body at times, but the nocebo effect makes us all too familiar with it, and abuse it with medicine.”

Beyond the negative effects of drugs, Pilcher’s book examines the effects of nocebo on a number of demographics including aging, “hex death”, or the death of people who believe they are cursed to die, and many mental illnesses.

History has many examples of psychogenic illness, or MPI, such as fear caused by the reduction of genitalia in Asia, which was recorded two thousand years ago. It’s a nocebo effect on the scale. Although in the past the transmission of signals was limited by geography, today’s fast global communication and the presence of social media can make nocebo even more common.

In 2014, social media is thought to have spread many psychogenic diseases in Colombia. Children at a girls’ school started shaking and fainting after receiving the HPV vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer. Cases spread across the country and, although health officials found no link between the vaccine and the symptoms, public confidence in vaccines was shattered. From an HPV vaccination rate of over 90%, uptake has dropped to 5%.

Whether people’s nocebo symptoms can be physically proven is irrelevant. Our experiences such as pain or fatigue are behind a veil that we cannot penetrate. However Pilcher also points to several studies that show significant physiological changes due to the nocebo effect. In one interesting example, he cited a study at Stanford where participants were randomly told – regardless of their genetic makeup – that they had a gene associated with a low or high risk of obesity. GLP-1, synthetic analogues that include Ozempic, is a natural hormone released by the body that makes us feel full. After eating, those who were told they had the “thin” gene showed a significant increase in GLP-1, while those who were told they had the “fat” gene had no change from their baseline levels.

By interviewing a researcher who placed electrodes in the brains of cancerous mice in an area involved in controlling reward and positive emotions, Pilcher was struck by the discovery that stimulating this area reduced the cancer, and slowing it down made the cancer grow faster. This may be very difficult. Pilcher has a dog in the race, revealing on the front page that he too has cancer. However, despite his warnings that stimulating neurons in the mouse brain is not a good idea, the seed has been sown. There is a risk that the social consciousness that lends credibility to Mrs. Twit’s transformation into a myth — an idea that goes hand in hand with the growing body of research on the nocebo effect — could turn out to be an ugly thing.

Ultimately, The Book Can Cause Consequences deals with interpersonal theories: how we think about ideas and things, and how we can shape our future. While Pilcher avoids tackling philosophy directly, this important and engaging book will add to our understanding of these difficult and controversial questions. It can also help us avoid the nocebo effect in our daily life. As far as results go, it’s pretty good.