Expectation as a self-fulfilling prophecy

In 2007, American Derek Adams had a proper fight with his girlfriend. The relationship seemed to have gone to pieces. 

As a result, the Adams swallows the entire contents of a month's worth of antidepressants - 29 pills at a time.

A short time later, the neighbor took a shaking Adams to the nearest hospital, where dangerously low blood pressure and dizziness were detected. The blood test revealed: no toxins detectable. Although the patient received 6 liters of IV over the next 4 hours, Adams' condition continued to deteriorate. 

Then a physician was consulted who was in charge of a drug trial in which Adams had participated a month earlier. This doctor informed the patient that he was in the placebo group of the study, i.e. he had only received tablets without any active ingredient.

Within 15 minutes, the blood pressure and heart rate then normalized, and the patient could be discharged soon after. 

The case is a classic example of the nocebo effect. This was first defined in 1961, when it was discovered that the placebo effect also works in the other direction. That is, that an imagined drug or an imagined external danger can cause extremely real effects - and negative ones at that.

It is only in the last two decades that the nocebo effect has been increasingly researched. The problem here is that it is hardly ethically justifiable to subject healthy persons to a pathogenic effect. 

Nevertheless, we know that about 25% of all subjects in a drug test develop the symptoms described under side effects. These subjects are from the placebo group, i.e. they have not received any active substance.

The expectation alone triggered the symptoms. 

Clifton Meador was a physician at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who documented nocebo cases. He says:

Hardly anyone from the Western world would be impressed by a voodoo spell. But how about a person who writes titles like doctor or professor in front of his name, wears a white coat and points to a pile of laboratory findings on which his devastating prognoses are based, which will determine your life from now on?

Even those who are "important" cannot escape this kind of modern voodoo: more and more leaders from business and politics are dutifully undergoing so-called "check-ups". The idea: healthy people are examined in order to detect illnesses at an early stage. The crux of the matter: diseases are seldom discovered, but so-called "deviations from the norm" often are. And precisely these turn healthy people into insecure patients.
"It's not acute, but it's something we should watch" is a phrase that makes you sick - for life.

The Deutsche Apotheker Zeitung addresses this topic under the title "Nocebo - If you believe it, you get sick:" in detail.

Nocebo: Attention risk of infection!

That the Nocebo effect but even contagious can be, was determined by the following Try shown:
A group of students was asked to breathe room air that was supposed to contain toxins. The participants were informed in advance about the symptoms that might occur as a result. Some of the test persons then watched a colleague develop exactly the symptoms that had been mentioned before, e.g. headaches and nausea. In reality, however, it was completely normal air and an actress who acted out the symptoms. The observers of the scene - also exposed only to normal air - then developed to a large extent the same symptoms, and significantly more often and more strongly, than the group that had not observed the play. 

Hans Mohl hosted the television program "Gesundheitsmagazin Praxis" on ZDF from 1964 to 2004. The day after the program, many doctors' offices were filled with patients who had discovered the symptoms described in Mohl's program and were correspondingly concerned.
The phenomenon was given the name "Mohl's disease," and to this day it serves as an example of the impact that media coverage has on the public's perception of itself.

There are some publications that deal with the phenomenon in detail, such as "Diagnosis of Mohl's disease - a diagnosis of the disease". How TV doctors fill their colleagues' practices". Or: Do the media make you sick?

Here is another example of a "contagious" nocebo effect. In September 2018, Emirates flight 203 takes off from Dubai bound for New York. Over the course of the 14-hour flight, 99 of 427 economy class passengers plus 7 crew members fall ill with flu-like symptoms, diarrhea and fever. Upon arrival, the plane is quarantined and all passengers are examined individually. It turned out that only 10 people really needed treatment, 7 of them crew members! However, if they had been sick at the time of departure, they would hardly have reported for work. On the other hand, contagion and outbreak of flu is impossible even considering the shortest possible incubation periods.

A classic Nocebo effect, probably intensified by being "locked up" in an airplane.

Areas where outbreaks of baseless mass hysteria are repeatedly observed are the Middle East and also Central America. The science magazine Newscientist reports about an outbreak of mass hysteria in Nicaragua in 2003, in the course of which rows of young women were afflicted by respiratory distress and even suffocation symptoms. The article concludes with the question: "Is there a solution?

Response: the public should be encouraged to adopt a fear-free attitude, while at the same time minimizing media attention to this issue."

Nocebo & Corona

In this context, it cannot fail to consider the nocebo effect in the corona crisis. Mind you, this is not about the evaluation of corona as a disease, but only about the effects that must inevitably take place through the associated media coverage.

However, the corresponding references and warnings from psychologists, sociologists, brain researchers, neuroimmunologists, etc. are at best ignored or even deleted.

In a Interview panic researcher Prof. Dirk Helbig is asked, "How do you counter hysteria?"

His answer: "Through education. And by not looking at a problem from which the world will not end under a magnifying glass and thus making it seem much bigger than it is. Other mortality risks are much greater. In a way, the Corona crisis is a maturity test for our modern society and all of us."