[cblum]

Going off a tangent here but just wanted to comment how powerful the nocebo effect can be.

I'm familiar with it in the context of strength sports, where "tweaking" your back, knees, etc. is relatively common.

If you tweak something and immediately go "oh no no no I'm gonna be out for weeks now", it does happen. The pain only seems to get worse for days, you can't move, if it's your lower back sometimes you can barely get out of bed.

When you learn to distinguish between "I'm hurt" (something felt a little funny and it hurt a bit, but you're still functional) vs "I'm injured" (something actually went really wrong, like a major muscle strain, or blunt trauma), and learn to keep a positive attitude in the face of pain, you're back in a couple days.

There's a group called Barbell Medicine that completely changed my mindset when it comes to nocebo. They teach people to accept pain is part of life, and to assess it instead of immediately worrying or panicking about it and going into what they call "movement avoidance".