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KodaSmash12 t1_iscam8q wrote

Yes actually. What you're thinking of is called the nocebo effect. Distrust and other similar things can cause symptoms to worsen and cause problems health wise.

Infact Voodoo is one of the biggest causes of the nocebo effect, which can go so far as to cause death. All with just the power of belief.

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regular_modern_girl t1_iscvnc2 wrote

A lot of culture-bound syndromes are also partly based on this phenomenon, particularly those concerning some type of perceived witchcraft.

One of the more peculiar examples is Koro, aka “penis panic”, which has been reported in a number of different cultures across the world, and basically involves men becoming so paranoid that a witch is making their genitals shrink and/or not work properly that they actually become delusional and hallucinate their penises retracting into their bodies (to some extent the retraction might be quite real, considering anxiety can cause testicular/penile retraction, the thing is that in reality it’s obviously not actually permanent, though).

The funny thing about culture-bound syndromes is that not only can (fear of) witchcraft cause them, but appropriate magic charms or spells can actually be effective in treating them (via the regular placebo effect, obviously).

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KodaSmash12 t1_isd4xun wrote

Isn't the brain a neat little thing? It can be affected by so many things, big and small, and all it takes is the power of belief.

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regular_modern_girl t1_isdqlxk wrote

Another interesting (possible) example of this was the very weird “Morgellons disease” phenomenon during the ‘00s.

Basically, a bunch of people around the US (and maybe elsewhere) suddenly began going to doctors complaining of some really bizarre symptoms, such as itching and general skin irritation, lesions, sensations of “crawling” under the skin, panic (and iirc some also reported memory loss), and strangest of all, the appearance of inexplicable colorful fibers in their lesions (which were claimed by the patients to be growing out of their skin), and in some cases also supposed sightings of tiny black gnats or flies exiting the lesions.

Initially, some of the medical community took the whole thing seriously, and I believe there was even a CDC investigation to see if it was in fact some novel epidemic, but fairly quickly a lot of doctors grew a lot more skeptical when they couldn’t really find any signs of any sort of parasite or pathogen whatsoever in the patients (I think it was reported briefly that a number of them had previously suffered Lyme disease, but this may not have turned out to be a significant enough correlation), and also the fact that lab tests of the mysterious fibers revealed mundane, household sources for the most part (implying that patients were placing them in the lesions themselves, and probably creating the lesions with excessive scratching).

A lot of medical professionals dismissed the whole thing as an unusually-widespread example of Münchausen syndrome (which is p much a fancy medical way of saying “bullshitting for attention”), but there were also some more charitable assessments that it was actually an unusual epidemic of delusional parasitosis (where, again because of the nocebo effect, a person actually starts experiencing signs of parasitic infestation simply by psyching themselves into believing they have parasites) spreading as a culture-bound syndrome (partly due to the internet).

In my humble opinion, I think it was probably some mixture of both genuine psychogenic illness and Münchausen.

From what I understand, the whole thing calmed down after a few years and people stopped reporting “Morgellons” symptoms mostly, although I’ve heard it still occasionally pops up as a thing even to this day.

It just goes to show that, even though there’s a popular perception of culture-bound syndromes as a phenomenon of less enlightened past times and “primitive” cultures, something that we educated Westerners are surely above, the thing is we’re not, we’re still human and just as subject to these things as anyone else, really no matter how “rational” we think we are.

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fatWhiteGoodman t1_ism6zx1 wrote

Great response. CDC did a deep dive into it. Another hypothesis was some kind of fabric (fibers) or substance getting into human skin. But they could never identify much of anything in common between subjects. I think some kind of mental disorder like delusional parasitosis is still the most likely interpretation based on the experiences I had with patients.

But yes, there are multiple doctors like Stricker still publishing about Morgellon's to this day.

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GoldPhoenix52 t1_ise1qt9 wrote

Ngl “Nocebo” sounds like something you just made up. I know it isn’t, but the name is silly

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