Nocebo effect
From Psychology Wiki
Community portal · Tasks to do · News · Help
Clinical · Educational · Ind&Org · Other fields · Professional · Transpersonal · World
Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language | Personality | Philosophy | Research Methods | Social | Statistics
Clinical: Approaches · Group therapy · Techniques · Types of problem · Areas of specialism · Taxonomies · Therapeutic issues · Modes of delivery · Model translation project · Personal experiences ·
The nocebo effect is the phenomenon whereby a patient who believes that a treatment will cause harm actually experiences adverse effects. Nocebo translates from Latin as "I shall harm". More broadly, the effectiveness of, for instance, Voodoo curses on suggestible victims can be considered an example of the effect.
The nocebo effect is distinguished from older concepts such as sociogenic illness and psychosomatic illness, which are broader terms where a known or unknown cause with cultural or psychological factors is involved. Distinguishing between these effects can be a difficult problem for medical semiotics, or the study of how to interpret the patient's description of their ailments.
The nocebo effect is the reverse of the well-known placebo effect.
[edit] See also
 This psychology-related article is a stub. You can help the Psychology Wiki by expanding it. |
| This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Nocebo effect. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Psychology Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. |
