Alternativ medicine Is it all in the mind? One in five people in the UK choose to use alternative medicine Alternative medicine may be news, but it's not new. It's modern medicine that is new --- for example, the first syntheic(人造的)drug, aspirin, only dates from 1899. But alterntive medicine goes back thousands of years. Acupuncture(针灸), inserting fine needles at selected points in the body, was ued in China over 2,000 years ago and keeps growing in popularity. Herbal(草药的)medicine, treating illness and pain with natural remedies(治疗), is the oldest system of medicine in th world. Herbalists are prepared to spend more time than modern doctores with patients so they can treat them as individual. And what's next? "Acupuncture-in-a-pill!" A company in Singapore expects to identify the gene responsible for acupuncture healing soon. It plans to make a pill for people who want to avoid having acupuncture becasue they can't stand the thought of all those needles. A recent TV program on alternative medicine showed a young Chinese woman having open-heart surgery without a general anaesthetic(麻药)--- but with acupuncture. There seemed to be no doubt that accupuncture stopped the woman from feeling pain. Later the program showed how the needles appeared to change the brain's reaction to pain. Then there's the "placebo"(安慰剂)effect. In a major trial in the USA a group of patients had a normal operation for bad kneee pain. Another group of patients with knee pain also believed they had operations. But in fact all the surgeon did was cut the knww open and close it again. Both groups had the same positive results from their "operation". In ohter words, the effect of real and fake operations was the same. So what does this experiment tell us about medicine? Simply this: When people expect to get better they often do.