Shaykh Ibn ʿUthaymīn on the Effects of Emotions Upon Health and Sickness

Shaykh Ibn Al-ʿUthaymīn (رحمه الله) said:^[1]

Emotions have a great effect on weakening a person. So sometimes the healthy person might think he is ill and thus becomes ill. And sometimes a person ignores illness while he is ill and he becomes healthy. Thus, the soul being emotionally affected by something has a far-reaching effect.

For this reason, you will see some people being afflicted by psychological illnesses, the origin of their affliction being their weakness at the beginning of the affair until a person presumes he is ill with such and such, and the delusion grows until that which he presumed [to be the case] becomes a reality.

Thus, the one who wore a bracelet to treat weakness [in health], it will not increase him except in weakness because he believes that as long as it remains on him he will be safe and that when he removes it, the weakness will return.

Comment: See: Nocebo effect. Positive and negative emotions can have a powerful effect on sickness and health as well as other areas of life. This effect is of interest to scientists because it is seen as an annoying interference to medications and treatments because they operate upon materialism and they do not acknowedge the soul or effects outside their materialistic domain. Drugs with established biological mechanisms of action do not seem to work in some individuals, failing to demonstrate their effects.

Also, one must be wary that even though this is a true phenomenon, it can potentially be used to mask or cover up the harmful effects of drugs and other medical interventions. It can be said that the drug was harmful, or did not work because the patient had negative expectations. Thus it was the patient's fault, "he did not respond well to the drug". When in reality, the negative effect was a true biological effect due to something unique in the biochemistry of that individual.

Update: 27th March 2023:

In relation to what had been written above, here we have a Washington Times article just published, "Study finds negative attitudes amplify vaccine side effects", and it attempts to blame vaccine side effects on the "nocebo effect":

People who do not expect anything good from COVID-19 vaccines and have negative experiences with their bodies report worse side effects from the shots, a new study found.

The study found participants who expected little to no benefit or significant adverse effects from the shots, who tended to “catastrophize instead of normalize benign bodily sensations” and who had prior negative experiences of the first shot were more likely to report severe aches, pains and other ailments.

According to the researchers, these findings confirm the psychosomatic role of “nocebo effects” in driving vaccine hesitancy.

As was mentioned earlier, though this phenomenon is true, it can potentially be used to whitewash medical interventions which have established, proven harms. These types of studies that make statistical correlations cannot provide evidence of causation in each and every case, and thus the affair is not free of ambiguity. Further, even if the effect was true, then there are a sufficiently large number of people with a positive attitude who still suffer adverse events of various degrees of severity, or even die which proves that it is the intervention causing these effects and not just the emotional state of a person. The emotional state of a person can exacerbate or worsen side effects that are known and established from the intervention.

1000 Peer Reviewed Medical Papers Submitted To Various Medical Journals, Evidencing A Multitude Of Adverse Events In Covid-19 Vaccine Recipients
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(80 pages)

Arabic Text:

Footnotes

1. Al-Qawl al-Mufīd (Dār al-ʿĀṣimah: Riyāḍ, 1415H) 1/167.