VOA慢速英语20060712a

HEALTH REPORT - Explaining the Placebo¹ EffectBy Staff

Broadcast: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 16:00:00 UTC

I'm Katherine Cole with the VOA Special English Health Report.

Studies of new drugs traditionally involve at least two groups of people. The people in one of those groups are given only what they think is the drug. Really they get a placebo -- an inactive substance. The drug is proven effective if it performs better than the placebo.




Some researchers do not think drug studies should use placebos². They say it makes more sense to compare new medicines to drugs already on the market. Then people would know if a new drug is any better.

Placebo is Latin for I shall please. It may contain nothing more than sugar.

Yet some people who are given a placebo experience improvements in their health. This is called the placebo effect.

Some doctors use the placebo effect in their treatments. An influential³ study published in nineteen fifty-five said placebo treatments made patients feel better thirty-five percent of the time.

But in two thousand one, Danish researchers reported that they had examined more than one hundred studies. They found little evidence of healing as a result of placebos.

Still, there is continued belief in the placebo effect.

A Swedish study published last year suggested that a placebo can reduce the emotional effects of unpleasant experiences. The study involved people who looked at images of dead bodies and other unpleasant pictures. The findings appeared in the journal Neuron.

The researchers said the effects in the brain were similar to those seen when placebos have been used as a pain treatment. In both cases, they said, expectations of improvement are a major influence.

But more than expectations might explain why placebos appear effective sometimes.

Researchers led by Scot Simpson at the University of Alberta, in Canada, just had a report published in the British Medical Journal. They examined twenty-one studies. These compared death rates between patients who always took their medicine and those who did not.

Even patients who took placebos had better results than those who did not follow doctor's orders. The researchers see this finding as support for the idea of a so-called healthy adherer effect. That is, a person who takes a drug treatment as directed may also do other things to live a healthy life.

And that is the VOA Special English Health Report. You can download free transcripts⁴ and MP3 files of our weekly reports at www.unsv.com. I'm Katherine Cole.

1 placebo   

n.安慰剂；宽慰话

参考例句：

• The placebo has been found to work with a lot of different cases.人们已发现安慰剂能在很多不同的病例中发挥作用。
• The placebo effect refers to all the observable behaviors caused by placebo.安慰剂效应是指由安慰剂所引起的可观察的行为。

2 placebos   

n.（给无实际治疗需要者的）安慰剂( placebo的名词复数 )；安慰物；宽心话；（试验药物用的）无效对照剂

参考例句：

• But, eventually, I think they were just kind of like placebos. 但是后来，我想它们只是安慰剂（安慰剂：没有任何药效的药） 来自电影对白
• But comparable numbers of those who received placebos also improved. 但是吃安慰剂的人的病情也改善了。 来自互联网

3 influential   

adj.有影响的，有权势的

参考例句：

• He always tries to get in with the most influential people.他总是试图巴结最有影响的人物。
• He is a very influential man in the government.他在政府中是个很有影响的人物。

4 transcripts   

n.抄本（ transcript的名词复数 ）；转写本；文字本；副本

参考例句：

• Like mRNA, both tRNA and rRNA are transcripts of chromosomal DNA. tRNA及rRNA同mRNA一样，都是染色体DNA的转录产物。 来自辞典例句
• You can't take the transfer students'exam without your transcripts. 没有成绩证明书，你就不能参加转学考试。 来自辞典例句