Voodoo & the Evil Eye

This past Saturday I was invited to speak to the local meeting of the Barbados Society of Central Florida. I'd spoken to them before on diabetes and I thought retinal detachments might be an interesting and important subject, but I threw in a little bit about voodoo magic as well.

Most of don't give much serious thought to voodoo, but there are mechanisms by which it can really cause disease. Years ago, I had a suggestible young fellow from Jamaica as a patient who believed his wife was hexing him. Supposedly, she had placed a hex on him which would make him blind, and shrotly thereafter he began to notice symptoms in his right eye. Well, lo and behold, when I examined him he really did have a retinal detachment, a type called central serous retinopathy which can be seen in individuals under stressful situations. But was it voodoo?

Certainly, common sense would have us believe otherwise and no physician would admit to a direct relationship between disease and curses, in this case voodoo, but an indirect connection has been recognized for years. We've all heard stories of voodoo death. Just stories right? Well, that’s what you’d like to believe.

Back in World War I, physicians were witness to peculiar cases of soldiers dying on the battlefields of the Western Front. These traumatized soldiers hadn’t suffered any mortal wounds but they inexplicably died of shock, a medical disorder normally brought on by a critical drop in blood pressure from excessive bleeding. Some of these same physicians later became familiar with cases of supposed voodoo death, and they recognized a connection with the soldiers. They suggested that, just like individuals morbidly terrified by a magic spell, the soldiers suffered from an over stimulation of the nervous system which led to a form of fatal shock. Fear, in other words, stimulated the nervous system to such a degree that the excessive release of tremendously potent biological hormones caused vital hemostatic alterations and, in those susceptible, death.

Voodoo, essentially, is the sinister opposite of the placebo response, whereby a patient’s belief that a medicine will work, even if no actual medication is administered, results in improvement of a medical condition – a phenomenon well documented in medicine. In voodoo and related phenomena, individuals believe that something bad will happen to them and, even if there is no physical stimulus, it does. So, in this fellows case, and that of central serous retinopathy, acute stress likely induces a similar, but more locally acting, hormonal imbalance that alters the hemodynamics of the retina and result in a retinal detachment with vision loss. My patient's detachment eventually resovled as he came to grip with his stresses - as you can imagine he was in a very difficult marriage - and in the end, there really was some truth to voodoo magic in this old wife’s tale – evil eye and all.