Placebo Effect Reading Answers

Placebo Effect Reading Answers are provided below. These are provided here for your convenience. It has 14 questions of three different question types.

Table of contents:

• Solution for Placebo Effect
• Placebo Effect IELTS Reading Practice Test
• Passage
• Questions
• Answers with Explanations

Solution for Placebo Effect

In the table given below, you have the Placebo Effect reading answers. Evaluate your score using them to know your performance.

Answer Table

1. D	2. A	3. G	4. B
5. H	6. F	7. A	8. D
9. C	10. FALSE	11. Not Given	12. TRUE
13. TRUE	14. FALSE

Placebo Effect IELTS Reading Practice Test - Exam Review

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The Placebo Effect IELTS reading practice test helps you test your reading skills and performance. Highlight the keywords while reading the passage to enable a faster answering process. Try matching all the possible endings with the statement given to get a sentence with the same meaning as the one in the passage. Read the statement carefully, as they are paraphrased to increase difficulty.

Passage

You have been given the placebo effect reading passage below. Spend around 20 minutes solving this passage which consists of 14 questions. Read the passage carefully and swiftly before answering. We have also provided Placebo Effect reading answers with locations.

Placebo Effect - The Power of Nothing

1. Want to devise a new form of alternative medicine? No problem. Here is 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 are saying. Something invented off the top of your head could not possibly work, could it?
   
   
2. 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 will get the credit. But that’s only part of it. Some of the improvement really would be down to you. Your healing power would be the outcome of a paradoxical force that conventional medicine recognizes but remains oddly ambivalent about the placebo effect.
   
   
3. 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 a placebo is a touchy subject for many practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine, 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 or misunderstood.
   
   
4. 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 medicines, as some would like, without losing much of this power.
   
   
5. 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 done so far 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, morphine-like neurochemicals known to help control pain.
   
   
6. 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 involved in generating the placebo response,” says Don Price, an oral surgeon at the University of Florida who studies the placebo effect in dental pain.
   
   
7. “But endorphins are still out in front.” That case has been strengthened by the recent work of Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin, who showed that the placebo effect can be abolished by a drug, naloxone, which blocks the effects of endorphins. Benedetti induced pain in human volunteers by inflating a blood-pressure cuff on the forearm. He did this several times a day for several days, using morphine each time to control the pain. On the final day, without saying anything, he replaced the morphine with a saline solution. This still relieved the subjects’ pain: a placebo effect. But when he added naloxone to the saline, the pain relief disappeared. Here was direct proof that placebo analgesia is mediated, at least in part, by these natural opiates.
   
   
8. Still, no one knows how belief triggers endorphin release or why most people can’t achieve placebo pain relief simply by willing it. Though scientists don’t know exactly how placebos work, they have accumulated a fair bit of knowledge about how to trigger the effect. A London rheumatologist found, for example, that red dummy capsules made more effective painkillers than blue, green, or yellow ones. Research on American students revealed that blue pills make better sedatives than pink, a color more suitable for stimulants. Even branding can make a difference: if Aspro or Tylenol is what you like to take for a headache, their chemically identical generic equivalents may be less effective.
   
   
9. It matters, too, how the treatment is delivered. Decades ago, when the major tranquilizer chlorpromazine was being introduced, a doctor in Kansas categorized his colleagues according to whether they were keen on it, openly skeptical of its benefits, or took a “let’s try and see” attitude. His conclusion: the more enthusiastic the doctor, the better the drug performed. And this year Ernst surveyed published studies that compared doctors’ bedside manners. The studies turned up one consistent finding: “Physicians who adopt a warm, friendly, and reassuring manner,” he reported, “are more effective than those whose consultations are formal and do not offer reassurance.”
   
   
10. Warm, friendly, and reassuring are precisely CAM’s strong suits, of course. Many of the ingredients of that opening recipe – the physical contact, the generous swathes of time, the strong hints of supernormal healing power – are just the kind of thing likely to impress patients. It’s hardly surprising, then, that complementary practitioners are generally best at mobilizing the placebo effect, says Arthur Kleinman, professor of social anthropology at Harvard University.

Questions

Questions 1 - 6

Use the information in the passage to match the deed, listed A - H, with the statements.
In boxes 1 - 6 on your answer sheet, write the appropriate letters A - H.
NB: A letter can be used more than once.

1. Appointments with an alternative practitioner
2. An alternative practitioner’s description of the 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

List of Endings

1. should easily be understood.
2. should improve by itself.
3. should not involve any mysticism.
4. ought to last a minimum length of time.
5. needs to be treated at the right time.
6. should give more recognition.
7. can earn valuable money.
8. do not rely on any specific treatment.

Questions 7 - 9

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.
Write your answers in boxes 7 - 9 on your answer sheet.

7. In the fifth paragraph, the writer uses the example of anger and sadness to illustrate that:

1. People’s feeling could affect their physical behavior.
2. How a placebo achieves its effect is yet to be understood.
3. Scientists don’t understand how the mind influences the body.
4. Research on the placebo effect is very limited.

8. Research on pain control attracts most of the attention because

1. Only a limited number of researches have been conducted so far.
2. Scientists have discovered that endorphins can help to reduce pain.
3. Pain-reducing agents might also be involved in the placebo effect.
4. Patients often experience pain and like to complain about it.

9. Fabrizio Benedetti’s research on endorphins indicates that

1. They are widely used to regulate pain.
2. They can be produced by willful thoughts
3. They can be neutralized by introducing naloxone.
4. Their pain-relieving effects do not last long enough.

Questions 10 - 14

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
In boxes 10 - 14 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE: if the statement is true
FALSE: if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN: if the information is not given in the passage

10. There is enough information for scientists to fully understand the placebo effect.
11. A London-based researcher discovered that red pills should be taken off the market.
12. People’s preference for brands would also have an effect on their healing.
13. Medical doctors have a range of views of the newly introduced drug of chlorpromazine.
14. Alternative practitioners are seldom known for applying the placebo effect.

Answers for Placebo Effect with Explanations

The Placebo Effect reading answers with explanations are given below. They will assist you in your performance evaluation process.

1. Answer: D
Explanation: Paragraph A, 2nd Line. Your treatment should involve physical contact, and each session with your patients should last at least half an hour. The phrase “at least hour an hour” suggests that it is the minimum amount of time required. Therefore, option D, “ought to last a minimum length of time.” is the correct answer.
 
2. Answer: A
Explanation: Paragraph A, 4th Line. Encourage your patients to take an active part in their treatment and understand how their disorders relate to the rest of their lives. 

3. Answer: G
Explanation: Paragraph B, 1st Line. A good living if you are sufficiently convincing, or better still, really believe in your therapy. As the line suggests if the alternative practitioner is confident in his work and ability, he or she will be able to earn a good livelihood.

4. Answer: B
Explanation: Paragraph C, 1st Line. Placebos are treatments that have no direct effect on the body, yet still, work because the patient has faith in their power to heal. The placebo effect proves itself and its worth over time.

5. Answer: H
Explanation: Paragraph C, 2nd Line. 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. Placebo treatment refers to any item or procedure as a cure in alternative medicine. Thus, the answer is option H.

6. Answer: F
Explanation: Paragraph C, 4th Line. The existence of the placebo effect implies that even quackery may confer real benefits, which is why any mention of a placebo is a touchy subject for many practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine, 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 or misunderstood.

7. Answer: A
Explanation: Paragraph E, 1st Line. 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.

8. Answer: D
Explanation: Paragraph E, 4th Line. Most of the scant research done so far has focused on the control of pain because it’s one of the commonest complaints and lends itself to experimental study.

9. Answer: C
Explanation: Paragraph G, 1st Line. “But endorphins are still out in front.” That case has been strengthened by the recent work of Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin, who showed that the placebo effect can be abolished by a drug, naloxone, which blocks the effects of endorphins. 

10. Answer: False
Explanation: Paragraph H, 2nd Line. Though scientists don’t know exactly how placebos work, they have accumulated a fair bit of knowledge about how to trigger the effect. The statement contradicts the line in the passage, as the line mentions that scientists have not accumulated enough information to fully understand, they just have a fair bit of knowledge of how to trigger it.
Thus, the answer is false.

11. Answer: Not Given
Explanation: Not Available. There is no relevant information related to this provided in the passage.

12. Answer: True
Explanation: Paragraph H, 7th Line. Even branding can make a difference: if Aspro or Tylenol is what you like to take for a headache, their chemically identical generic equivalents may be less effective.

13. Answer: True
Explanation: Paragraph I, 1st Line. Decades ago, when the major tranquilizer chlorpromazine was being introduced, a doctor in Kansas categorized his colleagues according to whether they were keen on it, openly skeptical of its benefits, or took a “let’s try and see” attitude.

14. Answer: False
Explanation: Paragraph C, 5th Line. The existence of the placebo effect implies that even quackery may confer real benefits, which is why any mention of a placebo is a touchy subject for many practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine, who are likely to regard it as tantamount to a charge of charlatanism. They often use a placebo as it is a touchy subject for them. Hence, the answer is false.

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