Pratoman notes in the current thread "Statistics Don't Apply" going on right now:
"Valerie Harper was diagnosed with Brain Cancer over 3 years ago. They told her she had 3 months to live. She just celebrated her 77th birthday and is doing well..."But what if Valerie had believed and trusted those doctors so much that she might have allowed their opinions (and they were only that) to affect her so much that she might
actually have died in three months?
We've all heard about
it, "voodoo death," and probably wondered if it could even be for real. In a primitive tribe somewhere, the witch doctor holds a position of great power, and, displeased with a tribe member for some reason, places a "death curse" on the person. Then this person subsequently wastes away and dies.
First of all, is this phenomenon even possible, has it ever actually occurred, or is it just urban legend? And if there is validity to it, is it actually possible that some individuals can be so under the control of what they consider to be unassailable medical authority, that the authority's mere declaration that death is imminent, is itself enough
to cause actual death in those individuals? If so, how can this possibly happen? What causes it?
Of particular interest to us, as the above thread title indicates, have there been and are there cases where a modern, science-based doctor has pronounced to a patient following cancer diagnosis (including PCa) that the situation is so dire that the patient has only months to live? And then the patient indeed dies a few months later? Accurate medical prediction, coincidence, or an instance of a civilized form of primitive "voodoo death"?
The article linked below is a good read on all this, going into detail on the physiology of "voodoo death" (or "psychogenic death" to use the scientific term).
From the article:
"As it turns out, the culprit behind psychogenic death is a hormone we’re all familiar with: adrenaline. Adrenaline is part of the fight-or-flight response of the body to a circumstance that someone perceives as danger. It’s meant to be helpful, of course, but sometimes--it’s rare--but sometimes it actually causes damage to individual heart muscle cells. This can lead to heart dysrhythmia and death."And
"Oddly, fear is not the only emotion that can trigger psychogenic death, though it is probably the most common. It could be any strong emotion."motherboard.vice.com/read/the-science-of-being-scared-to-death The article also cites some surprising examples of how some people were literally scared to death, or not even scared, just shocked to death, by something that happened to them.
So it seems that just having "strong emotion" may for some people be enough to produce "voodoo death," or send them down that dangerous path, so that eventually (but fairly soon) they do die from it.
Such as being told that one has cancer, there is no hope, and death is imminent. If the fact of such an announcement is enough to cause in some people such "strong emotions" (with subsequent release of excess adrenaline and the heart damage it may cause), then the phrase "words can kill" takes on a whole new meaning.
Can it be true? Some of the deaths attributed to cancer may have in reality happened only because the patient had convinced himself that his death was inevitable, especially because some doctor told him so. It wasn't the
cancer that killed him, but the
fear of it that did.
But there can be a positive outcome to this. That is, having a positive attitude keeps the adrenaline level down, it doesn't accumulate to a level that is dangerous to the heart, and the patient does all right.
But as FDR once said, maybe sometimes the only thing we really have to fear is fear itself? Because of what, in some people, it can do?