Nocebo is the scientific term for the creation of a negative expectation that results in reducing or negating the value of a treatment.
There was a high nocebo effect created by the fact that the drug has an extremely high risk for a combination of severe side effects including severe brain damage, impotancy, kidney failure, uncontrolable spasms, suicide, farting, diarrhea, serility, genetic mutations, birth defects, uncontrolable anger, sleep walking naked in front of large groups of people, cancerous lesions on the skin, ridecule from friends, quarantine and issolation for 6 months, etc.
by mlhiss March 30, 2008
Get the Nocebo mug.He was wrongly diagnosed with cancer and given 6 months to live. He died but he didn't have cancer, the cause of death was nocebo.
by Moonrunner47 February 6, 2019
Get the Nocebo mug.1. The reverse of the placebo effect.
2. It's when you expect to hate something and you end up hating it.
2. It's when you expect to hate something and you end up hating it.
1. Kennedy chose the Latin word nocebo ("I shall harm") because it was the opposite of the Latin word placebo ("I shall please"), and used it to denote the counterpart of the placebo response: namely, an "unpleasant" response to the application of real or sham treatment.
2. I hated the food because I expected it to suck. That's nocebo effect for ya.
2. I hated the food because I expected it to suck. That's nocebo effect for ya.
by swvfan October 2, 2012
Get the nocebo effect mug.by LowKey January 25, 2019
Get the Nocebo mug.The ethical and clinical dilemma of how to inform patients of risks without inducing those very risks through the information itself. The principle of informed consent demands full disclosure of potential side effects. But the act of disclosure can dramatically increase the likelihood and severity of those effects via the nocebo pathway. This puts doctors in a Catch-22: withhold information and be unethical, or disclose it and potentially harm the patient through the power of suggestion. Medicine has no good protocol for navigating this.
Example: A doctor must prescribe a statin. The leaflet lists possible side effects: muscle pain, fatigue, cognitive fog. The patient, now anxious and hyper-vigilant, experiences all three. It's impossible to clinically distinguish between a genuine pharmacological side effect and a nocebo-induced one. The hard problem: How do you practice evidence-based, ethical medicine when the communication of evidence becomes a potent confounding variable that can generate its own adverse data? The diagnostic process can become pathogenic. Hard Problem of the Nocebo Effect.
by Dumuabzu January 25, 2026
Get the Hard Problem of the Nocebo Effect mug.The dark twin of the placebo problem: How can the mere expectation of harm, or negative information from an authority figure, generate authentic, measurable disease? This is more ethically fraught because it suggests that diagnoses, pessimistic prognoses, or even warning labels on medications can iatrogenically cause the very symptoms they describe. The mind's capacity for negative autosuggestion appears to have a direct, pathogenic pathway into the body, turning fear into physiology.
Example: In a drug trial, participants warned of a rare side effect (e.g., "may cause headaches") report that side effect at significantly higher rates, even if they're in the group receiving the sugar pill. More drastically, cases of "voodoo death" or mass psychogenic illness show communities developing real rashes, paralysis, or fainting spells after a perceived threat, with no toxic cause found. The hard problem: How does the semantic content of a threatening suggestion bypass conscious reasoning and directly orchestrate a pathological bodily response, creating illness from an idea? Hard Problem of Nocebo.
by Dumuabzu January 25, 2026
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