Adler studied a group of Hmong refugees from Laos who had immigrated to central California in the late 1970s and were not always able to perform their traditional religious rites during the upheaval of genocide and relocation. In Hmong culture, there is a strong belief that night-mares can be fatal; this evil expectation, or nocebo, apparently contributed to the sudden unexplained nocturnal deaths of almost two hundred Hmong immigrants {mostly young and in good health} in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Once they were more assimilated and the old beliefs lost their power, the sudden deaths stopped.
( Oliver Sacks )
[ Hallucinations ]
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