You might think Voodoo is increasingly rare, and limited to remote tribes, but according to Clifton Meador, a doctor at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville who has documented case study's, 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 had not spread. "He didn't die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer," says Meador. "If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying." Cases such as Shoeman's may be extreme examples of a far more widespread phenomenon. Many patients who suffer harmful side effects, for instance, may do so only because they have been told to expect them. What's more, people who believe they have a high risk of certain diseases are more likely to get them than people with the same risk factors who believe they have a low risk. It seems modern witch doctors wear white coats and carry stethoscopes.

The idea that believing you are ill can make you ill may seem far-fetched, yet rigorous trials have established beyond doubt that the converse is true - that the power of suggestion can improve health. This is the well-known placebo effect. Placebos cannot produce miracles, but they do produce measurable physical effects. The placebo effect has an evil twin: the nocebo effect, in which dummy pills and negative expectations can produce harmful effects. The term "nocebo", which means "I will harm", was not coined until the 1960s, and the phenomenon has been far less studied than the placebo effect. It's not easy, after all, to get ethical approval for studies designed to make people feel worse.
Carly Grrl "Sexy Red" not left for good - promise! - 14 years, 9 months, 19 days ago

since i'll be around for a few weeks does anyone wanna trade thumbs? xoxo
Carly Grrl "Sexy Red" not left for good - promise! - 14 years, 9 months, 29 days ago

Dough, wonga, greenbacks, cash. Just words, you might say, but they carry an eerie psychological force. Chew them over for a few moments, and you will become a different person. Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others. And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain.

This is all the stranger when you consider what money is supposed to be. For economists, it is nothing more than a tool of exchange that makes economic life more efficient. Just as an axe allows us to chop down trees, money allows us to have markets that, traditional economists tell us, dispassionately set the price of anything from a loaf of bread to a painting by Picasso. Yet money stirs up more passion, stress and envy than any axe or hammer ever could. We just can't seem to deal with it rationally... but why?

Our relationship with money has many facets. Some people seem addicted to accumulating it, while others can't help maxing out their credit cards and find it impossible to save for a rainy day. As we come to understand more about money's effect on us, it is emerging that some people's brains can react to it as they would to a drug, while to others it is like a friend. Some studies even suggest that the desire for money gets cross-wired with our appetite for food. And, of course, because having a pile of money means that you can buy more things, it is virtually synonymous with status - so much so that losing it can lead to depression and even suicide.
Carly Grrl "Sexy Red" not left for good - promise! - 15 years, 11 days ago

THEY called it the second summer of love. Twenty years ago, young people all over the world donned T-shirts emblazoned with smiley faces and danced all night, fuelled by a molecule called MDMA. Most of these clubbers have since given up ecstasy and are sliding into middle age. The question is, has ecstasy given up on them?

Enough time has finally elapsed to start asking if ecstasy damages health in the long term. According to the biggest review ever undertaken, it causes slight memory difficulties and mild depression, but these rarely translate into problems in the real world. While smaller studies show that some individuals have bigger problems, including weakened immunity and larger memory deficits, so far, for most people, ecstasy seems to be nowhere near as harmful over time as you may have been led to believe.

Nobody is arguing that taking ecstasy is risk-free: its short-term effects are fairly uncontroversial. MDMA is toxic, though not powerfully so - an average person would need to take around 20 or 30 tablets to reach a lethal dose. And for a small fraction of people, even small amounts of ecstasy can kill. For example, around half a million people take ecstasy every year in England and Wales, and 30 die from the acute effects, mostly overheating or water intoxication.

The most pronounced effects are on memory, mainly verbal and working memory. While the ability to plan is somewhat affected, other aspects of executive function are not. Focused attention - the ability to zoom in quickly on a new task - suffers too, though sustained attention does not. It is a similar story with depression. "There's a small but measurable effect,". These effects appear not just in current users but also in ex-users who haven't touched the drug for at least six months, suggesting that the problems are long-lasting. Strangely, there seems to be no link between the quantity taken and the severity of cognitive problems, suggesting that even a few doses can lead to these deficits.

Superficially, this adds up to a pretty depressing outlook for the e-generation, especially those who dabbled years ago but have since quit. Not so, says Gabriel Rogers of the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, UK. Subtle differences in lab tests do not necessarily translate into real-life problems: "They're statistically significant, but whether they are clinically significant is another matter." For example, there is little evidence that people are actually affected by the memory and attention deficits picked up in the lab tests. "They don't seem to be very big and it is not clear that they have much effect on day-to-day functioning," he says.



The low-down on ecstasy

* Ecstasy usually refers to a compound called MDMA or 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine.
* MDMA was first synthesised by German firm Merck in the early 20th century but only started to be used as a recreational drug in the 1980s.
* There are around 450,000 regular users in the US; half a million people take it each year in the UK. A seriously heavy user might take up to 40,000 tablets in a lifetime.
* Drug dealers originally wanted to call MDMA "empathy" because of the powerful feelings of "loved up" warmth it induces. MDMA is also a stimulant and a mild psychedelic.
* Recent research suggests that most ecstasy pills on the market contain MDMA as their only active ingredient. Toxic impurities are often said to be common, but there is very little evidence that this is the case.
* Most of the ecstasy on the market is in pill form, with each pill containing around 40 milligrams of MDMA. But very pure MDMA powder accounts for around 30 per cent of drugs seized, which is worrying because of the potential for taking very large doses.
* A single ecstasy tablet used to cost £15. Now they cost just £2.30.


Carly Grrl "Sexy Red" not left for good - promise! - 15 years, 2 months, 14 days ago

Why be miserable? Antidepressants can help banish sad feelings so it's no surprise that more and more people are taking them. But is this really such a good idea? A growing number of cautionary voices from the world of mental health research are saying it isn't. They fear that the increasing tendency to treat normal sadness as if it were a disease is playing fast and loose with a crucial part of our biology. Sadness, they argue, serves an evolutionary purpose - and if we lose it, we lose out.

"When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume that it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn't have been burdened with it. We're fooling around with part of our biological make-up" - Jerome Wakefield.

Perhaps, then, it is time to embrace our miserable side. Yet many psychiatrists insist not. Sadness has a nasty habit of turning into depression, they warn.

So who is right? Is sadness something we can live without or is it a crucial part of the human condition?

Wakefield believes that in humans sadness has a further function: it helps us learn from our mistakes. Paul Keedwell, a psychiatrist in the UK, says even full-blown depression may save us from the effects of long-term stress. He also thinks that we may have evolved to display sadness as a form of communication. By acting sad, we tell other community members that we need support. Then there is the notion that creativity is connected to dark moods. There is no shortage of great artists, writers and musicians who have suffered from depression or bipolar disorder. It would be difficult to find enough recognised geniuses to test the idea in a large, controlled study, but more run-of-the-mill creativity does seem to be associated with mood disorders.

There is also evidence that too much happiness can be bad for your career. Ed Diener found that people who scored 8 out of 10 on a happiness scale were more successful in terms of income and education than 9s or 10s - although the 9s and 10s seemed to have more successful close relationships. This could simply demonstrate that the happiest people are those who cherish close relationships over power and success, but it could also signal that people who are "too happy" lose their willingness to make changes to their lives that may benefit them. Medicating sadness could do the same - blunting the consequences of unfortunate situations and removing people's motivation to improve their lives.

Whether or not a little sadness is useful, everyone agrees that clinical depression is not. So which is more dangerous: to over-medicate normal sadness, a feeling which may lead us to re-evaluate our lives after the loss of a job or the end of a relationship, or under-medicate clinical depression?
Carly Grrl "Sexy Red" not left for good - promise! - 15 years, 3 months, 13 days ago