Category: fear

This was demonstrated by Alphonse Raymond Dochez in his paper Studies in the Common Cold. Oddly enough, this was the paper that convinced Dr. Andrewes that the common cold was due to a transmissable “virus” to the point where he adopted the views of Dr. Dochez as the CCU’s working hypothesis. In the 1930 paper, Dr. Dochez not only noted that volunteers could convince themselves that they had a cold when they did not, he also stated that the filtrates, regardless of whether containing the assumed “virus” or not, caused stuffiness, sneezing, and headaches:

“It is very easy for an individual who is being used for a transmission experiment to believe that he has a mild cold although objective evidence is extremely slight or absent. Where, as in the beginning of our work, volunteers believed that we were trying to produce colds, they were self-convinced occasionally that they were suffering from a mild infection. This was much easier of belief as the filtrate in practically all the cases, negative and positive, causes some slight stuffiness of the nose, a little sneezing and occasionally slight headache.”

As an example, Dr. Dochez spoke about a patient who was given an injection of sterile broth without “virus.” When he was accidentally told by an assistant that he had failed to catch a cold, that night, the man began to suffer severe symptoms. When he was told the next morning that he had been misinformed about the nature of his injection, the man’s symptoms disappeared within an hour:

“It was apparent very early that this individual was more or less unreliable and from the start it was possible to keep him in the dark regarding our procedure. He had inconspicuous symptoms after his test injection of sterile broth and no more striking results from the cold filtrate, until an assistant, on the second day after injection, inadvertently referred to his failure to contract a cold. That evening and night the subject reported severe symptomatology, including sneezing, cough, sore throat and stuffiness of the nose. The next morning he was told that he had been misinformed in regard to the nature of the filtrate and his symptoms subsided within the hour. It is important to note that there was an entire absence of objective pathological changes.”

The power of the nocebo effect, which is where the belief that a negative outcome from a treatment or procedure actually causes the manifestation of that outcome and results in harm, is a well-known phenomenon. This was something acknowledged by researchers before, during, and after the CCU experiments. In the CCU’s intake form, they advised that “the volunteer should not be bound to think that he will develop symptoms after being given nose drops.” In fact, they admitted that “there is a good chance that he may not” as “some volunteers prove resistant to the virus inoculum anyway.” They admitted that “by and large, only about one third of all volunteers actually develop symptoms.” These symptoms are non-specific, and they are exactly the same as those attributed to hay fever and seasonal allergies. Thus, on top of the issues with patients manifestimg symptoms due to the belief that they may get a cold just from undergoing the experiment, the interpretation of a cold is entirely subjective which is why they utilized a double-blind set-up to try and mitigate “incorrect interpretations” by the researchers as well as to ensure that they did not imagine signs and symptoms that were not there. Just the action of injecting these solutions into the nasal cavities, regardless of whether they contain a “virus” or not, will result in symptoms such as headache, malaise, stuffiness, and sneezing, as noted by Dr. Dochez and the authors of the 1958 study. Thus, it can be easily concluded that it is due to the experimental procedure itself, along with the reaction, both physically and mentally, of the individual to the presence of foreign substances, that results in the occurrence of the non-specific symptoms which are then subjectively interpreted to be the common cold by the researchers based upon the inoculum given.