Nocebo/Placebo. What's going on?

Most know about the placebo effect. It is where your mind works with your body to heal, because it believes it can/will despite the 'medication' being imaginary.
But have you heard of its evil twin, the Nocebo effect? This is where you are convinced you are ill when there's no medical evidence showing you have anything wrong with you.
There are many examples of the Nocebo effect. Here is one. Most don't read the small print on the folded sheet of paper inside a packet of drugs.
However, when a patient is read out, in a serious voice by a doctor, the side effects of a drug, they are far more likely to suffer those side effects.
If humans just had a bias towards wanting to get better, then the Placebo effect could be that. But the Nocebo effect questions the whole mind/body relationship.

It seems that for better, or for worse, the biological machinery humans are born with can easily be affected by the rather woolly concept of expectation.
Studies on Nocebo seem to suggest that several things turbo-charge it. Belief in the person telling you something. A track record of something appearing to have an effect.
Thirdly, and interestingly, others around that person acting as if whatever someone's been told is inevitable.

So where is the philosophy in this? Well, much has been made of the separation of mind and body in understanding humans.
The brain is seen as the clever thinking thing that accepts signals from the body and the world, through sense organs like sight and touch, sound, smell etc.
The brain is then where, supposedly, this sensory data is evaluated independently as to the quality, truth, meaning etc. of the information it receives.
Meanwhile, the body is seen as mechanistic, reacting to the influence of food, exercise, injury etc.
Yes, the brain appears to make the body move, and yes, the placebo effect won't fix a broken leg caused by falling out of a third story window.
Nocebo/Placebo still begs the question; how and why does the body react to the abstract ideas we have within our heads about our health? Be it imagined side effects, shifting pain thresholds, the veracity of drugs and, in extreme examples, allowing the body to die because of a mistaken cancer diagnosis? This last example one of many documented in Helen Pilcher's book entitled 'This book may have side effects'.

Perhaps the idea that the brain is detached from the body, that the mind is somehow separate, is mistaken. That what can be seen as ethereal or metaphysical thoughts and the material body, are not two distinctly different things.

Take the analogy of driving a car. Deciding in your head that you are not breaking down doesn't stop your car from not working if it is faulty. . Nocebo/Placebo seems to achieve this though, with thoughts able to fix, heal, or for Nocebo, make us sick. Human health seems to have a very large psychological component to it then, something modern medicine has recently woken up to. And to such an extent, one could argue, that the concept of mind/body no longer serves our health needs. Yet it persists.

Could it be that how humans think and feel is less mind/body, but an interplay between body, belief, being, expectation and cultural context?

Part one. What is behind the influence of our minds on our bodies, and why/how is this trick achieved?
Part two. What other models of seeing humans may be viable, if we were to dispense with the traditional mind/body concept?

PiPs is part of a national movement to encourage people to think about some of the 'big ideas' in life. No expertise necessary, only the desire to do what Wittgenstein described as 'untangling the knots in the way we think about things'.
It is a collective activity, not a debating club.
Everyone attending, and there is often a wide range of people present, is encouraged to listen to and engage with the topic. We hope it is fun and provides plenty of food for thought.
The organisers are trying to find ways to collect money from attendees towards the costs of running the sessions, mostly the costs of using this Meetup site. One of the organisers has something on their phone that can take payments. Suggested amount? Just a few quid now and again for regulars. For anyone turning up for the first time, it's free.