在整体和范围内，随着韦尔的观点流行,人们可以从疾病获得更好的的治疗条件。事实上的实验探讨表明,安慰治疗,可以特别有效的缓解疼痛和炎症,例如可以加快伤口愈合,增加感染的免疫反应。下面的范文进行详述。

How common are placebo effects, so defined? The surprising truth seems to be that they are everywhere. Stories of the kind I've just recounted about Ada are not, of course, to be relied on to make a scientific case. But the scientific evidence has been accumulating, both from experimental studies within mainstream medicine and from the burgeoning research on alternative medicine and faith healing. And it shows beyond doubt that these effects are genuine, powerful and remarkably widespread (Brody, 2017; Buckman & Sabbagh, 1993; French, in press; Harrington, 1997; Kirsch, 1999; Pearce, 1995; Sternberg, 2017; Talbot, 2017; Wall, 1999b).

Andrew Weil, one of the best known advocates of alternative medicine, now argues that "the art of medicine" in general "is in the selection of treatments and their presentation to patients in ways that increase their effectiveness through the activation of placebo responses" (Weil, 1955, p. 52). And he describes in his book, Spontaneous Healing, the range of things that he has found from his own experience can do the trick. "Over the years . . . patients have sung the praises of an astonishing variety of therapies: herbs (familiar and unfamiliar), particular foods and dietary regimens, vitamins and supplements, drugs (prescription, over-the-counter, and illegal), acupuncture, yoga, biofeedback, homeopathy, chiropractic, prayer, massage, psychotherapy, love, marriage, divorce, exercise, sunlight, fasting, and on and on. . . In its totality and range and abundance this material makes one powerful point: People can get better" (Weil, 1995, p. 53).

What's more, as Weil goes on, "people can get better from all sorts of conditions of disease, even very severe ones of long duration." Indeed experimental studies have shown that placebos, as well as being particularly effective for the relief of pain and inflammation, can for example speed wound healing, boost immune responses to infection, cure angina, prevent asthma, lift depression, and even help fight cancer. Robert Buckman, a clinical oncologist and professor of medicine, concludes that "Placebos are extraordinary drugs. They seem to have some effect on almost every symptom known to mankind, and work in at least a third of patients and sometimes in up to 60%. They have no serious side-effects and cannot be given in overdose. In short they hold the prize for the most adaptable, protean, effective, safe and cheap drugs in the world's pharmacopoeia" (Buckman & Sabbagh, 1993, p. 246). Likewise, another medical authority, quoted in a recent review in the British Medical Journal, dubs placebos "the most effective medication known to science, subjected to more clinical trials than any other medicament yet nearly always doing better than anticipated. The range of susceptible conditions appears to be limitless" (Ernst & Resch, 1995, p. 552).

"Limitless" may be an exaggeration. Nonetheless, it's fair to say that just about wherever placebos might work, they do. In other words, wherever a capacity for self-cure exists as a latent possibility in principle, placebos will be found to activate this capacity in practice. It's true that the effects may not always be consistent or entirely successful. But they certainly occur with sufficient regularity and on a sufficient scale to ensure that they can and do make a highly significant contribution to human health.

Benefits of remaining sick / Costs of premature cure
It depends how we define sickness. If sickness means a pathological condition of the body or mind that is unconditionally harmful, then there cannot of course ever be benefits to remaining sick. However if sickness is taken more broadly to mean any abnormal condition of body or mind that you, the patient, find distressing and from which you seek relief, then it may be quite another matter.

It has been one of the major contributions of evolutionary theory to medicine to remind us that many of those conditions from which people seek relief are not in fact defects in themselves but rather self-generated defences against another more real defect or threat (Nesse and Williams, 1994).

Pain is the most obvious example. Pain is not itself a case of bodily damage or malfunction - it is an adaptive response to it. The main function of your feeling pain is to deter you from incurring further injury, and to encourage you to hole up and rest. Unpleasant as it may be, pain is nonetheless generally a good thing - not so much a problem as a part of the solution.

It's a similar story with many other nasty symptoms. For example, fever associated with infection is a way of helping you to fight off the invading bacteria or viruses. Vomiting serves to rid your body of toxins. And the same for certain psychological symptoms too. Phobias serve to limit your exposure to potential dangers. Depression can help bring about a change in your life style. Crying and tears signal your need for love or care. And so on.

Now, just to the extent that these evolved defences are indeed defences against something worse, it stands to reason that there will be benefits to keeping them in place and costs to premature cure. If you don't feel pain you're much more likely to exacerbate an injury; if you have your bout of influenza controlled by aspirin you may take considerably longer to recover; if you take Prozac to avoid facing social reality you may end up repeating the same mistakes, and so on. The moral is: sometimes it really is good to keep on feeling bad (Nesse, 1991).

Costs of the process of cure as such
When the sickness is self-generated, so that cure can be achieved simply by switching off whatever internal process is responsible for generating the symptoms in the first place, then, it's true, the cure comes cheap - and there should indeed be little reason to hold back just on cost grounds.

With pain, for example, you may well be able to achieve relief, when and if desirable, simply by sending a barrage of nerve signals down your own spinal cord or by releasing a small amount of endogenous opiate molecules. Similarly, with depression, you may be able to lift your mood simply by producing some extra serotonin. The production costs of the neurotransmitters, the endorphins or serotonin, are hardly likely to be a serious limitation.

However, it may be a very different story when the sickness involves genuine pathology and the cure requires extensive repair work or a drawn-out battle against foreign invaders - as with healing a wound or fighting an infection or cancer. For in this case the process of cure may turn out to be far from cheap.

In particular, if and when the cure involves the activity of the immune system, the costs can mount rapidly (Owens & Wilson, 1999; Sheldon & Verhulst, 1996). For a start the production of immune agents (antibodies, etc.) uses up a surprisingly large amount of metabolic energy (so much so, that early in life when a child's immune system is being built up, it actually takes as much energy as does the brain; and it's been found in animals that when the immune system is artificially stimulated into extra activity the animals lose weight unless they're given extra food (Svensson et al., 1998)). But besides the calories, the production of immune agents also requires a continual supply of quite rare nutrients in the diet, such as carotenoids (Olson & Owens, 1998). Ideally you should be able to build up reserves when times are good. But, even so, once a major immune response is under way, even the best reserves may get used up - so that every time you go on the attack against today's threat you are compromising your ability to respond to a new threat further down the road.

And then, as if this weren't enough, there is the added problem that mounting an immune response can pose quite a danger to your own body, because the immune agents, unless they are controlled, may turn on your own tissues and cause autoimmune disease. This is a particular danger when the body is already under stress, for example as a result of strenuous exercise (Råberg et al., 1998). It means that even when the resources for overcoming an invader are potentially available, it will not always be possible to deploy them safely to maximum effect.

The overall costs of the immune system are in fact so very great that most people most of the time simply cannot afford to keep their system in tip-top order. At any rate this is true for animals living in the wild. And the ramifications of this go beyond health issues as such, to affect courtship and reproduction. In several animal species, and maybe humans too, differential ability to maintain the costly immune system has become the basis for sexual selection (Møller et al., 1999). So that when a male or female is looking for a mate they pay close attention to indicators of immunocompetence - as shown for example by the colours of a bird's feathers, or the symmetry of the body or quality of skin.()

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