The Nocebo Effect

With Energy Tapping we can change negative beliefs that cause stress and impact our health. This report by Bruce Lipton emphasizes how big an impact those negative beliefs can have. He calls it the “Nocebo” effect.

While most of us are aware of the healing influences of the placebo effect, few are aware of its evil twin, the nocebo effect. Just as surely as positive thoughts can heal, negative ones-including the belief we are susceptible to an illness or have been exposed to a toxic condition-can actually manifest the undesired realities of those thoughts.

Japanese children allergic to a poison ivy-like plant took part in an experiment where a leaf of the poisonous plant was rubbed onto one forearm. As a control, a nonpoisonous leaf resembling the toxic plant was rubbed on the other forearm. As expected almost all of the children broke out in a rash on the arm rubbed with the toxic leaf and had no response to the imposter leaf.

What the children did not know was that the leaves were purposefully mislabeled. The negative thought of being touched by the poisonous plant led to the rash produced by the nontoxic leaf! In the majority of cases, no rash resulted from contact with the toxic leaf that was thought to be the harmless control. The conclusion is simple: positive perceptions enhance health, and negative perceptions precipitate dis-ease. This mind-bending example of the power of belief was one of the founding experiments that led to the science of psychoneuroimmunology.

Considering that a minimum of one third of all medical healings are attributed to the placebo effect, what percentage of illness and disease might be the result of negative thought in the nocebo effect? Perhaps more than we think, especially since psychologists estimate that 70 percent of our thoughts are negative and redundant.

Bruce Lipton
http://www.brucelipton.com/book-excerpts/the-nature-of-dis-ease