The Placebo Effect

Passage preview

Want to devise a new form of alternative medical treatment? No problem. Here’s the recipe. As a practitioner, be warm, sympathetic, reassuring and enthusiastic. Your treatment should involve physical contact, and each session with your patients should take 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. Get them to pay you well. 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 of blind mechanistic science. Oh, come off it, you’re saying. Something like that couldn’t possibly work, could it?

Answers

1. 27. D
2. 28. A
3. 29. H
4. 30. B
5. 31. G
6. 32. D
7. 33. A
8. 34. C
9. 35. NO
10. 36. NOT GIVEN
11. 37. YES
12. 38. YES
13. 39. NOT GIVEN
14. 40. YES

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