Wind Farms Don’t Make You Sick!!

A recent study by the National Health and Medical Research Council has concluded that there is no evidence for the symptoms felt by people who are claiming to be getting sick from wind farms or more commonly known as Wind Farm Syndrome.

This latest study confirms other studies done abroad and I won’t bore you with the full rundown (Link at the bottom for anyone who wants it) but it won’t do much to help the people suffering from the Syndrome.

So what’s going on?

The Lead theory is that the Nocebo effect is causing people to experience symptoms where there is no cause. What is the Nocebo effect? Well, it is the belief that something is causing you harm when it isn’t and you manifest symptoms because of that belief. You might be thinking, hey that kind of sound like Placebo. Well, you would be right. The Placebo effect is well documented and Nocebo was actually coined when people who were given placebos had bad side effects. So what causes it in the first place?

Well, let’s look at a hypothetical.

Say a man who is healthy moves to an area with a wind farm nearby and then starts to experience serve headaches. He goes to the doctor and can’t get a valid diagnosis and so starts looking for answers himself. It would be easy and almost logical (but not really at all) to say, hey I just move near a giant wind power plant and now I’m getting headaches but as any good scientist will tell you Correlation does not imply causation. Now let’s say the man starts to really believe this and doesn’t know that it was just a viral infection that lasted 6 weeks. Because he believes it so strongly, even after his body has defeated the virus he will continue to have symptoms just because of his belief.

Here is where it gets much worst. The man now starts talking to his neighbour and really sells his case. The neighbour can now blame (albeit subconsciously) any number of ailments on the wind farm too. Nausea, vomiting, dizziness are just a few of Wind farm Syndrome symptoms. Now the real bad part. If this snowballs and the media gets hold of it the Nocebo effect can go global.

Now we are not trying to say this is how it started, this is just a hypothetical look at the Nocebo effect but it stands to reason that if people where more informed, immersed themselves in scientific research and had a greater understanding of science and how the world works, this kind of thing would be a lot less prominent in our society.

Highly recommend watching the video below from CP Grey as he explains Nocebo very well.