Nocebo in pandemic
The term placebo is now familiar to many. In medicine, it refers to a drug without an active ingredient and is officially used only in trials,
to test the effectiveness of drugs against a supposedly ineffective drug.
Why do I write officially? Because the procedures in medicine alone are placebos. If the patient is confronted with people in scrubs who demonstratively still have the stethoscope
in the pocket, most people believe in the authority of the wearer. The entire environment also radiates medical competence, so that it is often almost equally
valid what the doctor then applies as a method.
Outside of tests no placebos can be used, because the patient must be truthfully informed what is in the drug, this is so prescribed.
But what do nocebos do? Exactly the same, only in the other direction. While a placebo (lat. I use) can cause something positive,
a nocebo (lat. I harm) causes a rather undesirable condition.
Example 1: A woman has to go to the hospital every now and then for an examination because she has had a narrowing of a heart valve since childhood. Once the head physician
once during the visit and tells his entourage that this is a classic case of "TS". The woman believes that "TS" stands for "terminal situation",
which means she's about to die. Soon she can hardly breathe, fluid is collecting in her lungs. Even a resident doctor can't convince her,
TS is the abbreviation for tricuspid valve stenosis, the technical term for her disease. The alarmed chief physician returns to the patient a few hours later to explain the misunderstanding to her again in person - but by then she is already dead, dead of water lung.
Example 2: A truck driver enters his refrigerated trailer, the door slams shut, the driver is trapped and cannot free himself. As a result, the driver is found
found frozen to death the next morning. What the man did not consider in his panic was the fact that the refrigeration unit had not been switched on at all
and the temperature was never in the critical range.
Why am I writing this? I am thinking of the current widespread fear among the population, people walking around outdoors alone with masks on, people spraying everything with
disinfectants on everything they can see.
And then I wonder how this "pandemic" would have gone without the scare tactics. I also mean, how it would have gone if there weren't so many people believing,
that there was a deadly virus out there trying to kill us all.
The other day I saw a piece where Amish people in the US were asked about the pandemic. These are people who are very devout, reject everything modern and live as they did
live like they did 100 years ago. They didn't notice anything about it, neither more nor less died than usual and if someone is ill,
they don't go to the hospital, but are nursed back to health at home. Almost no one has been vaccinated, because they don't trust the government or the hospitals.
The situation is similar in large parts of Africa, although hardly anyone there wants to be vaccinated. They have probably had bad experiences with the pharmaceutical industry.
One can think about it.
