Derek Thompson

Sickness is in the body.

That's a physiological malady, right?

A broken bone, cancer.

That would be a sickness.

Illness is in the mind.

And you can be sick without being ill.

For example, if you have cancer, but you don't have any symptoms, you have a sickness without having an illness.

You can also have an illness without having a sickness.

you can have the perception, for example, chronic pain.

Chronic pain is defined as pain that has no physiological cause that we can find, but persists for more than six months.

And what happens here is almost a placebo effect in reverse.

We call it a nocebo effect.

That when I focus my attention on that painful signal and I anticipate it to increase and I begin losing agency around my ability to contain that pain, it amplifies and amplifies and amplifies until it becomes debilitating.

And so it turns out that we can heal these illnesses, these suffering in the mind, just as much as actually we can create these maladies as well.

Not that it's not real.

I think some people hear that and say, well, are you saying that my pain is not real?

No, no, no, no.

All pain is real.

All pain is real.

And all pain is in the brain.