雅思阅读 4: The Placebo You Know Is Fake（明知是安慰剂也有效）

改编自 Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore / ScienceDaily（2026年6月）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260625060159.htm

Reading Passage

A. The placebo effect has long occupied an uneasy place in medical science. For decades, it was understood as a deception: patients improve because they believe they are receiving an active treatment, and the moment they learn the pill is sugar, the benefit evaporates. Clinical trials were built around this premise — the placebo arm exists precisely to control for the therapeutic value of deception. A study published in 2026 has turned that assumption on its head. Researchers at the Università Cattolica in Milan found that healthy older adults showed measurable improvements in memory, physical performance and stress levels after taking placebo pills for just three weeks — and, remarkably, the benefits were strongest among participants who knew from the outset that the pills contained no active ingredients at all. The term "placebo" itself derives from the Latin for "I shall please", and for much of the twentieth century it was regarded as something of an embarrassment in medicine — a tolerated deception, indispensable to clinical trials but too uncomfortable to prescribe openly.

B. The trial, led by psychologists Diletta Barbiani, Alessandro Antonietti and Francesco Pagnini, recruited ninety healthy older adults living in the community and randomly assigned them to one of three groups. The first received no treatment. The second received identical-looking pills but was told they contained active ingredients designed to improve well-being and physical function — the conventional, deceptive placebo. The third group received the same inactive pills but was openly informed that they were placebos that could nonetheless trigger beneficial mind-body responses. Before and after the three-week period, all participants completed questionnaires covering perceived stress, psychological well-being, sleepiness, fatigue, optimism and self-efficacy, as well as objective tests of short-term memory, selective attention and physical performance. Assignment to groups was conducted through computer-generated randomisation, and because all three groups received identical-looking capsules, neither the participants nor the testers could reliably tell which condition a given person belonged to. This double-blind design mattered: knowledge of group allocation could itself have influenced the questionnaires, particularly those measuring optimism and self-efficacy, where expectation is known to colour self-report.

C. The results defied the traditional expectation. Participants who knowingly took the placebo pills experienced lower stress levels than both the deceptive-placebo group and the untreated control group. They also showed significant improvements in short-term memory relative to those who received no intervention. Overall, both placebo groups experienced gains in cognitive and physical performance, but the magnitude of improvement was frequently greater in the open-label condition. Physical performance rose by seven per cent in the deceptive group and by 9.2 per cent in the open-label group. Cognitive scores increased by between 12.6 and 14.6 per cent among those who believed they were taking a real supplement, while participants who knew the pills were inactive improved by between 6.9 and 21.5 per cent depending on the specific test. The authors characterised these effects as comparable in size to those seen in experimental studies of structured physical activity and cognitive training. The pattern held regardless of baseline health: participants who began the study with lower physical function tended to show the largest gains, suggesting that the intervention narrowed rather than widened existing inequalities. The authors were careful to note that not every measure reached conventional levels of statistical significance, and that the confidence intervals around some of the smaller effects remained wide enough to leave room for doubt.

D. Why should knowing a treatment is fake enhance rather than abolish its effect? The researchers propose that expectation alone is insufficient to explain the pattern. In conventional deceptive placebos, the patient's belief in efficacy operates unconsciously, and the therapeutic response is tied to that belief. Open-label placebos, by contrast, require the patient to consciously endorse a mechanism — the mind-body connection — without the protective cloak of ignorance. The Milan team suggests that the act of openly acknowledging the placebo may itself mobilise attention and positive expectation in a way that covert administration does not. Participants in the open-label group, they note, also reported greater reductions in drowsiness, suggesting that the treatment engaged them more deeply rather than less. The finding raises intriguing ethical implications: if placebos work transparently, they could be prescribed without deception, sidestepping the long-standing ethical objections to placebo use in clinical practice. The argument is not that concealment should be abandoned wherever it remains useful — ordinary medical encounters still depend as much on trust as on evidence — but that open-label prescribing enlarges the available options. Critics counter that openly dispensed sugar pills risk eroding patients' confidence in real medicines, and that the ethics of even an "honest" placebo remain unsettled: does a pill prescribed for its symbolic value still count as treatment?

E. Several limitations temper enthusiasm. The sample was modest at ninety participants, and the study duration was only three weeks, leaving open the question of whether effects persist over months or years. All participants were healthy older adults living in the community, so the findings may not generalise to patients with diagnosed conditions, younger populations or clinical settings. The researchers also did not measure which psychological mechanisms — expectation, conditioning, ritual, or the social interaction of taking a pill — were primarily responsible for the improvement. Professor Pagnini nonetheless argues that the results add to a growing body of evidence that the mind plays an active role in the ageing process, and that thoughts, emotions and self-perception influence not only psychological well-being but physical abilities and cognitive function. For an ageing population facing rising healthcare costs, an intervention with no side effects, no active ingredients and no regulatory burden may be worth taking seriously — even, or perhaps especially, when everyone knows it is just a sugar pill. Follow-up studies are already planned, extending the trial to patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment and to younger volunteers, and testing whether the effect survives when the pills are dispensed by a family doctor rather than by a research team. Whether open-label placebos will eventually sit alongside diet and exercise as ordinary self-care remains an open question, but the 2026 Milan trial has ensured that the question is now debated rather than dismissed out of hand.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The financial cost of placebo research ii. How the study was designed iii. Why transparency may be therapeutic iv. Numerical results that overturned expectations v. The history of placebo use in medieval medicine vi. Caveats and future questions vii. Why patients prefer deception to honesty

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What was surprising about the open-label placebo group? A. They refused to take the pills once they learned they were inactive. B. They showed the largest improvements in several measures. C. They experienced more side effects than the other groups. D. They failed to complete the three-week study.

6. How did the physical performance figures compare? A. The control group showed a slight improvement. B. The deceptive group outperformed the open-label group. C. The open-label group improved more than the deceptive group. D. Both placebo groups showed identical physical gains.

7. What ethical advantage do open-label placebos offer? A. They can be prescribed without misleading the patient. B. They are cheaper than conventional medications. C. They require no clinical trials before use. D. They work faster than deceptive placebos.

8. What limitation does the article identify? A. The study was conducted only on patients with dementia. B. The long-term persistence of effects is unknown. C. The pills contained undisclosed active ingredients. D. Participants were not randomly assigned to groups.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Until this study, placebos were thought to work only when patients were unaware they were inactive.
10. The open-label group experienced lower stress than the other two groups.
11. Cognitive improvement was identical across all three groups.
12. The researchers identified the specific psychological mechanism responsible.
13. The study lasted for three weeks.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

In the traditional understanding, a placebo works because the patient is (14) __________ about its true nature. The new study suggests that openly acknowledging a pill is a placebo may mobilise positive (15) __________ without requiring deception.

答案与解析

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