Do you know what a placebo is? If not, read the following passage and you will have a clear idea of it. What’s more, you will learn about its remarkable effect on a person’s mind that, in turn, seems powerful enough to cure the body’s ills.

    Do you feel cheated if you go to the doctor and are sent home without a prescription? Doctors have found that in many cases, the psychological effect of being given some medicine to take does people more good than the medicine itself. For such people, doctors sometimes prescribe a placebo（安慰剂）.
      A placebo is a harmless pill, injection, or capsule that has no curative effects of its own, but that can give patients the mental boost they sometimes need to pull themselves through imaginary or minor illnesses.¹
     Recent research into the placebo is turning up new knowledge about the body’s ability to heal itself. It is as though there were a doctor in the body that will cure many of the body’s ills, if we will let it.
     Just how the placebo achieves its remarkable effects is not yet fully understood. Skeptics（怀疑论者）say the human mind is easily fooled. They contend that if the mind is fooled into thinking it received medicine, then it will make the body act accordingly.
     Others argue differently. They say the placebo allows the wish for health to materialize into a reality.^２ They say that since the placebo will not work if the patient knows it is a placebo, the body must not be fooled by it. The fact that patients believe they have been given medicine gives them hope. Their hope strengthens their desire to get better, and this promotes healing in the body.
     Of course it must be acknowledged that placebos do not always work. It seems that a good deal of their success rests ultimately on the relationship between patient and doctor. If the patient trusts the doctor implicitly（完全地）and if the doctor sincerely wants to help the patient, the placebo is more likely to work. So in a way the doctor is the most powerful placebo of all.
     Consider the following case as an example of the effect of the placebo. A group of people with bleeding ulcers（溃疡）were divided arbitrarily into two groups. The first group were told by the doctor that they had been given a new drug which, it was hoped, would give them some relief. The second group were told by a nurse that they had been given a new drug but that not much was known about how it would work.
     The experiment resulted in about 70 percent of the people in the first group showing great improvement while only 24 percent of the people in the second group showed any improvement at all.^３ In actual fact, both groups had been given the same thing, a placebo. It was significant that the group who had dealt with the doctor showed a much higher rate of improvement than those to whom the doctor did not speak.
     The placebo has been found to be effective in many different cases. It has been known to alleviate（减轻）everything from seasickness, to coughs and colds to pain following an operation. One notable experiment was done to see if the use of the placebo could even help health and longevity（长寿）in old people.
     This test, carried out in Rumania, included 150 people over the age of 60. They were divided into three groups of 50 people each. Those in the first group were given nothing at all. Those in the second group were given a placebo regularly and they were told it would be beneficial. The third group were in fact given a new drug, but it was one that in no way had any known effect on old age. They too were told the drug would help them.
     All the people were watched for several years, and the results were very interesting. The first group showed no alteration in behavior or the aging process from the other people in the village. The second group, those who took the placebo showed better health and a lower death rate. The third group, using a real but ineffective medicine showed very much the same result as the group taking the placebo.
     If the placebo has been known to have good results, it has also been known to be harmful. If patients believe they will have adverse reactions to a medicine, they are very likely to actually have a bad reaction, even to a placebo.
     This would seem to suggest that much of our reaction to medication is in our minds. Many doctors, however, are reluctant even to investigate the possibilities of the placebo. They believe that if there is any chance of a bad side effect, the placebo should not be used at all. They would rather wait until considerably more research has been completed.
     The use of the placebo, however, is not something new. It has been accepted practice for centuries in many countries of the world. In some African countries, tribal doctors base their practice on the knowledge that their patients are very likely to get better if they believe they’re going to. Many of the so-called “cures” these doctors employ could not possibly cure a sick person, and yet they frequently have the desired effect.
     The strange power of the placebo has not yet been fully explored, but what is already known does seem to suggest that the human mind is more powerful than we usually acknowledge. One interesting fact is that even people who state categorically they do not believe in mind over matter have themselves been cured by using a placebo.⁴
     How would you feel if you found out you had been taking a placebo instead of real medicine? If you recovered from your illness anyway, would you think the doctor had cheated you, or would you be grateful to find that your own mind had the power to heal your body?

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