Why a nocebo response?
The term “nocebo response” was coined in 1961 by Walter Kennedy (he actually spoke of a “nocebo reaction”). He had observed that another, entirely different and unrelated, and far more recent meaning of the term placebo was emerging into far more common usage in the technical literature (see homonym); namely that a “placebo response” (or “placebo reaction”) was a “pleasant” response to a real or sham/dummy treatment (this new and entirely different usage was based on the Latin meaning of the word placebo, “I shall please”). Kennedy chose the Latin word nocebo (“I shall harm”) because it was the opposite of the Latin word placebo (“I shall please”), and used it to denote the counterpart of the placebo response: namely, an “unpleasant” response to the application of real or sham treatment. Kennedy very strongly emphasized that his specific usage of the term nocebo did not refer to “the iatrogenic action of drugs”:[3] in other words, according to Kennedy, there was no such thing as a “noc
