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TEST 10 - Placebo effect – The Power of Nothing Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-H. 1. Appointments with alternative practitioner
2. An alternative practitioner's description of
treatment
3. An alternative practitioner who has faith in
what he does
4. The illness of patients convinced of
alternative practice
5. Improvements of patients receiving
alternative practice
6. Conventional medical doctors
A should be easy to understand.
B ought to improve by itself.
C should not involve any mysticism.
D ought to last a minimum length of time.
E needs to be treated at the right time.
F should give more recognition.
G can earn high income.
H do not rely on any specific treatment.
Want to devise a new form of alternative medicine? No problem. Here's the recipe. 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. Oh, come off it, you're saying. Something
invented off the top of your head couldn't 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'll get the credit. But that's only part of it. Some
of the improvement really would be down to you. Not necessarily because you'd recommended ginseng
rather than camomile tea or used this crystal as opposed to that pressure point. Nothing so specific. Your
healing power would be the outcome of a paradoxical force that conventional medicine recognises but
remains oddly ambivalent about: the placebo effect.
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 and misunderstood.
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.
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 to date 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, natural counterparts of morphine that are known to help control pain.
"Any of the neurochemicals involved in transmitting pain impulses or modulating them might also be