Want to devise a new form of alternative
medicine? No problem. Here is the recipe. A Be warm,
sympathetic, reassuring and enthusiastic. Your treatment should involve physical
contact, and each session with your patients should last at least half an hour.
Encourage your patients to take an active part in their treatment and understand
how their disorders relate to the rest of their lives. Tell them that their own
bodies possess the true power to heal. Make them pay you out of their own
pockets. Describe your treatment in familiar words, but embroidered with a hint
of mysticism: energy fields, energy flows, energy blocks, meridians, forces,
auras, rhythms and the like. Refer to the knowledge of an earlier age: wisdom
carelessly swept aside by the rise and rise of blind, mechanistic
science. B Oh, come off it, you are saying. Something
invented off the top of your head could not possibly work, could it? Well yes,
it could—and often well enough to earn you a living. A good living if you are
sufficiently convincing, or, better still, really believe in your therapy. Many
illnesses get better on their own, so if you are lucky and administer your
treatment at just the right time you will get the credit. But that's only part
of it. Some of the improvement really would be down to you. Your healing power
would be the outcome of a paradoxical force that conventional medicine
recognises but remains oddly ambivalent about: the placebo effect.
C Placebos are treatments that have no direct effect on the body,
yet still work because the patient has faith in their power to heal. Most often
the term refers to a dummy pill, but it applies just as much to any device or
procedure, from a sticking plaster to a crystal to an operation. The existence
of the placebo effect implies that even quackery may confer real benefits, which
is why any mention of placebo is a touchy subject for many practitioners of
complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), who are likely to regard it as
tantamount to a charge of charlatanism. In fact, the placebo effect is a
powerful part of all medical care, orthodox or otherwise, though its role is
often neglected or misunderstood. D One of the great
strengths of CAM may be its practitioners' skill in deploying the placebo effect
to accomplish real healing. 'Complementary practitioners are miles better at
producing non-specific effects and good therapeutic relationships,' says Edzard
Ernst, professor of CAM at Exeter University. The question is whether CAM could
be integrated into conventional medicine, as some would like, without losing
much of this power. E At one level, it should come as no
surprise that our state of mind can influence our physiology: anger opens the
superficial blood vessels of the face; sadness pumps the tear glands. But
exactly how placebos work their medical magic is still largely unknown. Most of
the scant research done so far has focused on the control of pain, because it's
one of the commonest complaints and lends itself to experimental study. Here,
attention has turned to the endorphins, morphine-like neurochemicals known to
help control pain. 'Any of the neurochemicals involved in transmitting pain
impulses or modulating them might also be involved in generating the placebo
response,' says Don Price, an oral surgeon at the University of Florida who
studies the placebo effect in dental pain. F 'But
endorphins are still out in front.' That case has been strengthened by the
recent work of Fabroizio Benedettil of the University of Turin, who showed that
the placebo effect can be abolished by a drug, naloxone, which blocks the
effects of endorphins. Benedetti induced pain in human volunteers by inflating a
blood-pressure cuff on the forearm. He did this several times a day for several
days, without saying anything, he replaced the morphine with a saline solution.
This still relieved the subjects' pain: a placebo effect. But when he added
naloxone to the saline the pain relief disappeared. Here was direct proof that
placebo analgesia is mediated, at least in part, by these natural opiates.
Still, no one knows how belief triggers endorphin release, or why most people
cannot achieve placebo pain relief simply by willing it.
G Though scientists do not know how exactly how placebos work, they have
accumulated a fair bit of knowledge about how to trigger the effect. A London
rheumatologist found, for example, that red dummy capsules made more effective
painkillers than blue, green or yellow ones. Research on American students
revealed that blue pills make better sedatives than pink, a colour more suitable
for stimulants. Even branding can make a difference: if Aspro or Tylenol are
what you like to take for a headache, their chemically identical generic
equivalents may be less effective. H It matters, too, how
the treatment is delivered. 'Physicians who adopt a warm, friendly and
reassuring bedside manner', reports Edzard Ernst, professor of Complementary and
Alternative Medicine at Exeler University, 'are more effective than those whose
consultations are formal and do not offer reassurance.' Warm, friendly and
reassuring are also alternative medicine's strong suits, of course. Many of the
ingredients of that opening recipe—the physical contact, the generous swathes of
time, the strong hints of supernormal healing power are just the kind of thing
likely to impress patients. It is hardly surprising, then, that aroma
therapists, acupuncturists, herbalists, etc. seem to be good at mobilising the
placebo effect.
—New Scientist
填空题
Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs, A-H. Choose
the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings
below. Write the correct number, Ⅰ-Ⅻ, in boxes on your answer
sheet. List of Headings
Ⅰ The positive and negative aspects of CAM Ⅱ The
warmer doctors are, the more effective treatments are Ⅲ
The limited understanding of the principle of the placebo effect
Ⅳ The detailed description of using placebos
Ⅴ The use of the placebo effect to heal real illnesses
Ⅵ How to generate the placebo effect Ⅶ Different
reasons for illnesses to get better Ⅷ People's
misunderstanding of the placebo effect Ⅸ The meaning of
placebo and its role in medicine Ⅹ The mechanism of
placebos Ⅺ A placebo effect Ⅻ The
effect of mood on illnesses
Paragrap
填空题
Paragraph B
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Paragraph C
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Paragraph D
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Paragraph E
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Paragraph F
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Paragraph G
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Paragraph H
填空题
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE
THAN THREE WORDS from Reading Passage 3 for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes on your answer sheet. Some
illnesses can be alleviated {{U}} {{U}} 35 {{/U}} {{/U}}, while
others may be the result of a {{U}} {{U}} 36 {{/U}} {{/U}}as
traditional therapists think, which is called the placebo effect. Placebo is
referred to as a {{U}} {{U}} 37 {{/U}} {{/U}}that can be applied
to any {{U}} {{U}} 38 {{/U}} {{/U}}And in many CAM
practitioners' mind, it is considered as equal to a {{U}} {{U}} 39
{{/U}} {{/U}}Although placebo has no direct effect on the body and its role is
always misunderstood, it is an influential part of all {{U}} {{U}}
40 {{/U}} {{/U}}.