Nocebo: Placebo nemesis

[donq]

I used to post about the placebo effect before, here let me put it this way, "while the placebo effect can make you forget the pain that just has been there, the nocebo efffect can make you feel the pain even it isn't there".

Recently, I have a quick read about Dissolving Pain by Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins and so agree with them. They said about "Narrow-objective attention" that, "Almost everyone suffers from overuse of chronic narrow-objective attention to some degree, predominantly due to emotional stress. Much of this habit originates in infancy and childhood, when we are too inexperienced to understand the world. Then this habit stays with us, along with an accumulation of stress."

"In simple terms, the brain is responsible for perceiving and registering pain. If it has become unstable because of paying attention chronically in emergency mode, it does a poor job of processing pain signals and is much more reactive and hypersensitive, registering pain that might have no physical cause or exacerbating minor pain to make it seem much worse than it is...
"Chronic narrow-objective focus, then, often creates a behavioral loop. Perhaps we bang a shin. We fight the pain by narrow-focusing away from it, which engages the sympathetic nervous system, which heightens arousal. In normal situations, the pain will dissipate. But in many cases, fighting the pain in narrow focus engages a fight-or-flight response, and the pain may take on a life of its own in the brain. If we fear the pain, it assumes an added emotional component. And with this stress, including tense muscles, the symptoms don’t get a chance to diffuse."

And it seems the following paragraph is the very key:

"I realized that a major factor in how I experienced the pain was how I paid attention to it. Instead of fighting the pain by narrowing my awareness onto it, resisting it, and avoiding it, I had broadened my awareness by opening to all my senses, and to space, putting the feeling of kidney pain squarely in the center of this expanded awareness. When I attended that way, the pain became a small part of my total awareness, and with the pain now a small part of my being, I could easily surrender into the pain and dissolve it."

This makes me think that shifting your attention is the very key to distract and dissolve our pain? Here an example from Milton H. Erickson's book comes to my mind, "One can think of a mother suffering extremely severe pain and all-absorbed in her pain experience. Yet she forgets it without effort or intention when she sees her infant dangerously threatened or seriously hurt."

And as Felix Mann, German-born acupuncturist wrote that even you use the wrong acu-points (for acupuncture and acupressure), it still works. Yes, I tried it myself, and it's really true.

Is that also true in any all of alternative therapy? I mean that the reason why they all really work?

As we all here are into spirituality, we are already familiar with this concept. The more we cling to something, the more we suffer from it. Shifting your focus and let it go is a very key.

P.S. I haven't come here for a while. So do my friends. Hope they are alright. I'd like to share some photo I saw on the internet which vert moved me but don't know if I could past its link. I believe the spiritual forum like this is the same. We donate our time and afford here to help, don't we?