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Comment by cyanydeez | Hacker News Reader

The real death of a person is the last time anyone thinks about them.

My work essentially involves brainstorming new bacterial targets for antibiotics, and over the past couple years this idea has crept into my mind.

Science statisticians tend to balk at the placebo effect, and use it as kind of a “zero effect”. But, I can’t help but notice how sometimes a placebo (or more generally a positive attitude) can actually help a patient overcome an illness.

I’ve met enough people suffering from terrible bacterial infections, and from my eye, the most positive people tend to have the best outcomes. Of course, modern science would have my head for any mystical thinking.

Is it also possible that positivity is physically harder to achieve / less likely to manifest for patients whose systems are compromised in such a way that they can't overcome the infection? We are brain-body systems after all, so to me the causality seems hard to untangle.

Did the chicken come first or the egg?

Your observation is not at all new. A famous quote from some doctor over a century ago, "Sometimes it's more important who has the disease than what disease the patient has."

This is part of the reason why candidate drugs need to show better outcomes over placebo. Placebo has measurable effects compared to nocebo.

> nocebo

Nocebo has measurable negative effects: it is the opposite of the placebo effect. Nocebo is health problems or a worsening of symptoms, solely due to the conscious or subconscious expectation of harm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo

Highly relevant to Covid vaccinations because subconsciously a lot of people fear side effects, so perhaps many anecdotal side effects are purely psychosomatic. I think psychosomatic symptoms are still truely harmful: few people can just decide to think themselves better.

For those like me that know little about the placebo effect, there's a nice episode[1] of the On Being by Krista Tippett podcast where she interviewed Erik Vance on the subject. His book is also very interesting for the uninitiated[2].

[1] https://onbeing.org/programs/erik-vance-the-drugs-inside-you...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32944584-suggestible-you

Romantic but far off topic from what it is about here?

With that, death becomes indeterministic for everybody, because unless believing that everything is predetermined, if someone will be remembered/thought off again is .. (even with the clacks thing btw).

And then also, what about people living, and noone ever thinking of them, are they dead too? :s

“When do you think people die? When they are shot through the heart by the bullet of a pistol? No. When they are ravaged by an incurable disease? No. When they drink a soup made from a poisonous mushroom!? No! It’s when… they are forgotten.”

― Dr. Hiriluk One Piece(Manga and Anime)

GNU Terry Pratchett.

Did you know reddit sends out a clacks overhead message?

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(Response to GET request from https://www.reddit.com/)

Not sure whether to be disappointed or to assume that's like, completely unofficial.