I don't know of people dying from a belief that they were cursed, but we do certainly know that placebos can have very real, measurable neurobiological effects. For example, there many studies looking at the body's response to placebo painkillers. The brain often releases neurotransmitters that bind to opioid receptors as if an actual painkiller had been taken: https://www.nature.com/articles/535S14a

The original comment was about placebos bringing "powerful relief," which there is a great deal of scientific research to support. As far as I'm aware, there is no serious medical researcher advancing the hypothesis that stage 4 cancer or type 1 diabetes should or can be treated via placebos.

"Objective malady" is a deliberately loaded term.

Generally in medicine there's a distinction between acute conditions and chronic conditions.

Allopathic (western) medicine has proved highly effective at treating acute conditions, including trauma/injury, certain forms of cancer and infection.

However, chronic conditions are still one of the primary experiences of many humans relating to their health, and allopathic medicine has generally done quite poorly at addressing these conditions. Other styles of treatment, including placebo, have been shown to be effective in at least reducing the severity or incidence of the symptoms associated with chronic conditions.

The fact that you don't want to consider someone's 20 year battle with chronic back pain, or neuropathy, or any other chronic condition, to be "an objective malady" doesn't make you the arbiter of what's real and what isn't.

> The fact that you don't want to consider someone's 20 year battle with chronic back pain, or neuropathy, or any other chronic condition, to be "an objective malady" doesn't make you the arbiter of what's real and what isn't.

Objective means measurable, definable, quantifiable. It has nothing to do with real or not. The human body is so complex with so many possibilities, I find it uninteresting to speculate about unknowns, hence restricting my request to what I am interested in.

Dying is an objective condition observable by others, so it piqued my interest as to how it was determined someone died due to a nocebo.

Most/many chronic conditions cannot be measured, defined, or quantified. The sufferer can give you some estimate on some scale that you describe that relates to the intensity and nature of their experiences.

I'm very glad to have seen an increasing number of health care professionals say things along the lines of "we have no idea what is causing their experience, and in fact, we think most it may be entirely psychogenic, but that doesn't change the fact that this is what they are actually experiencing, and that's as real for them as a puncture wound or an infection."

I'm not up to date on if there are any counter opinions to this, but I've heard that placebo's are similar in effect to SSRIs[1] - Though as always there's a lot of buts/ifs there.[2] My assumption is that a placebo causes people to expect things to get better and reduces stress levels, increases sleep quality and so on. I would figure a very supportive social network (family, prayer group) would probably have a similar effect.

That being said like you say for something more severe the placebo alone isn't going to do much, but I would imagine if you gave people a placebo that they thought would improve their stage 4 cancer recovery you would probably see an effect.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/

[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592645/