1. You are going to read a text about a placebo. What is placebo? What do you think the text might be about?

2. Now read the text. Were your predictions correct?

EXPLAINING THE PLACEBO EFFECT

Presented by the VOA Special English Health Report, 2006

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 placebos.  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 feel improvements in their health.  This is called the placebo effect.

Some doctors use the placebo effect in their treatments.  An important 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 analyzed 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 seem 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 evidence 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.

3. Read the text again and answer the following questions:

• Which countries are there references to? In what contexts?

• ‘Experiences’ is a countable noun in par. 8. What would its meaning be if it were uncountable?

• What is the origin of the word ‘placebo’? Use your dictionary to find out how it is related to the verb ‘please’. What is the meaning of the verb in that case?

• What do these numbers refer to: 2006 ,21 ,100, 2, 2001, 35, 1955, 1, 2005?

• What can be said about a placebo effect?

D. Use the words from the text associated with medicine to complete the mind-map below.

LISTENING

• You are going to listen to the text and replace the words in italics with the words you hear.

• Obviously those will be synonyms. Can you predict which words you might hear?

• Check your answers with a partner.

Post-listening

A. Match the words on the right with their opposites.

1. evidence(n) a) neglect (v)

2. reduce(v) b) hold info/facts back (v)

3. improvement(n) c) skepticism (n)

4. inactive(adj.) d) deterioration (n)

5. belief (n) e) speculation (n)

6. examine(v) f) active (adj.)

7. report(v) g) increase (v)