The Nocebo Effect: Negative Thoughts Can Harm Your Pain?

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Pain is something most people want to get rid of. It would be shocking if a person would want pain or create their own pain. Sounds outrageous, right? The millions of Americans suffering with diseases and conditions, from chronic pain to cancer, all want their pain to simply disappear. But, most people are aware that some treatment options and pharmaceuticals don’t always work. As a result, they are forced to live with their conditions or diseases for long amounts of time, sometimes even leading to their death. Other times, treatment options and pharmaceuticals that don’t medically have any pain-relieving or curing effect do work. In turn, patients who suffered with cancer or post-tooth extraction pain are relieved with nothing but a …show more content…

People are psychologically influenced by what they see around them. Lissa Rankin, a writer for Psychology Today, said in her recent article The Nocebo Effect: Negative Thoughts Can Harm Your Health, “In another study, patients about to undergo surgery who were “convinced” of their impending death were compared to another group of patients who were merely “unusually apprehensive” about death. While the apprehensive bunch fared pretty well, those who were convinced they were going to die usually did. Similarly, women who believed they were prone to heart disease were four times more likely to die. It’s not because these women had poorer diets, higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol, or stronger family histories than the women who didn’t get heart disease. The only difference between the two groups was their beliefs” (Rankin). If a person is told that he or she is vulnerable to or diagnosed with conditions such as heart disease, that person becomes psychologically disturbed: possibly leading to them creating their own symptoms, often …show more content…

Instead, there is a simpler way for patients to become sick without having to wait for excessive amounts of time at the doctor’s office. If you want to become sick, just turn on the television. Drug and treatment ads litter people’s entertainment screen and informs patients about drugs and treatments that remove symptoms for relatively serious conditions. These serious conditions include bipolar disorder, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, and heart disease. The advertisements, though, scare the public by showing a sad woman to represent bipolar disorder, leg pain for multiple sclerosis, stiffness for osteoporosis, and chest pain for heart disease. As a result, a woman who is fatigued from working late for the past week automatically assumes she suffers with bipolar disorder, a man who ran a marathon a few days ago assumes he suffers with multiple sclerosis, an elderly woman with a stiff neck (who’d slept the wrong way last night) believes she has osteoporosis, and a teen with chest pain (aka a heartburn after eating oily foods earlier that day) is afraid he has heart disease simply because that was what the television ad portrayed. As said by Cathy Davidson, contributor to the development of Duke University’s Program in Information Science and Information Studies at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, in her book Now You See It, “The music swells, we’re

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