Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Is Old Age Simply a Modern Voodoo Curse?

By Randall Fitzgerald / Source: Skepticism Enquirer

Compared to what medical science thought it knew about superstition just a few decades ago, the emerging medical consensus summarized below is nothing short of revolutionary.


Death from a voodoo hex or curse is an extreme form of the nocebo effect, the ‘evil twin’ or reverse energetic force of the better known placebo effect. Some people can literally wish themselves into a better state of health to forestall death (the placebo effect), while others can turn their worst fears into a rapid physical decline that leads to death (the nocebo effect).


How does that happen? How can words or symbolic actions cause a physically healthy person to quickly die, or to cause a person near death to rapidly recover?


What kind of bio-molecular model of reality can explain it? And does the phenomenon have broader implications for entire groups of people, such as the elderly who are brainwashed into believing and expecting the self-fulfillment of prophecies about their inevitable degeneration and death?


READ THE FULL STORY HERE...

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