> Or, for a nocebo result, people have actually died because they thought they had been cursed
Source?
I have yet to hear about an objective malady that can be fixed via placebo/nocebo, like stage 4 cancer, type 1 diabetes, etc.
Source?
I have yet to hear about an objective malady that can be fixed via placebo/nocebo, like stage 4 cancer, type 1 diabetes, etc.
The original comment was about placebos bringing "powerful relief," which there is a great deal of scientific research to support. As far as I'm aware, there is no serious medical researcher advancing the hypothesis that stage 4 cancer or type 1 diabetes should or can be treated via placebos.
Generally in medicine there's a distinction between acute conditions and chronic conditions.
Allopathic (western) medicine has proved highly effective at treating acute conditions, including trauma/injury, certain forms of cancer and infection.
However, chronic conditions are still one of the primary experiences of many humans relating to their health, and allopathic medicine has generally done quite poorly at addressing these conditions. Other styles of treatment, including placebo, have been shown to be effective in at least reducing the severity or incidence of the symptoms associated with chronic conditions.
The fact that you don't want to consider someone's 20 year battle with chronic back pain, or neuropathy, or any other chronic condition, to be "an objective malady" doesn't make you the arbiter of what's real and what isn't.
Objective means measurable, definable, quantifiable. It has nothing to do with real or not. The human body is so complex with so many possibilities, I find it uninteresting to speculate about unknowns, hence restricting my request to what I am interested in.
Dying is an objective condition observable by others, so it piqued my interest as to how it was determined someone died due to a nocebo.
I'm very glad to have seen an increasing number of health care professionals say things along the lines of "we have no idea what is causing their experience, and in fact, we think most it may be entirely psychogenic, but that doesn't change the fact that this is what they are actually experiencing, and that's as real for them as a puncture wound or an infection."
That being said like you say for something more severe the placebo alone isn't going to do much, but I would imagine if you gave people a placebo that they thought would improve their stage 4 cancer recovery you would probably see an effect.