Most people have heard of the placebo effect, but not many know about its evil twin, the nocebo effect. Interestingly, not even Apple knows what nocebo is because an ugly red line appears underneath the word on my laptop each time I spell it out. Placebo is derived from Latin, meaning ‘I shall please’. Nocebo is the opposite, ‘I shall harm’. A placebo is an inert substance or treatment given to a control group in medical studies to provide a baseline to which researchers can