New Scientist
Cover StoryThe new witch doctors: How belief can kill
Section snippets
Voodoo nouveau
You might think this sort of thing is increasingly rare, and limited to remote tribes. But according to Clifton Meador, a doctor at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who has documented cases like Vanders, the curse has taken on a new form.
Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame – yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and
Real consequences
It is also unclear who is susceptible. A person's optimism or pessimism may play a role, but there are no consistent personality predictors. Both sexes can succumb to mass psychogenic illness, though women report more symptoms than men. Enck has shown that in men, expectancy rather than conditioning is more likely to influence nocebo symptoms. For women, the opposite is true. “Women tend to operate more on past experiences, whereas men seem more reluctant to take history into a situation,” he
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Cited by (3)
Astrology and Popular Religion in the Modern West: Prophecy, Cosmology and the New Age Movement
2016, Astrology and Popular Religion in the Modern West: Prophecy, Cosmology and the New Age MovementAstrology and popular religion in the modern west: Prophecy, cosmology and the new age movement
2012, Astrology and Popular Religion in the Modern West: Prophecy, Cosmology and the New Age Movement