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  3. The belief that the mind plays an important role in physical illness goes back to the earliest days of medicine. From the time o

The belief that the mind plays an important role in physical illness goes back to the earliest days of medicine. From the time o

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问题     The belief that the mind plays an important role in physical illness goes back to the earliest days of medicine. From the time of the ancient Greeks to the beginning of the 20th century, it was generally accepted by both physician and patient that the mind can affect the course of illness, and it seemed natural to apply this concept in medical treatments of disease. After the discovery of antibiotics, a new assumption arose that treatment of infectious or inflammatory disease requires only the elimination of the foreign organism or agent that triggers the illness. In the rush to discover new antibiotics and drugs that cure specific infections and diseases, the fact that the body’s own responses can influence susceptibility to disease and its course was largely ignored by medical researchers.
    It is ironic that research into infectious and inflammatory disease first led 20th-century medicine to reject the idea that the mind influences physical illness, and now research in the same field—including the work of our laboratory and of our collaborators at the National Institutes of Health—is proving the contrary. New molecular and pharmacological tools have made it possible for us to identify the intricate network that exists between the immune system and the brain, a network that allows the two systems to signal each other continuously and rapidly. Chemicals produced by immune cells signal the brain, and the brain in turn sends chemical signals to restrain the immune system. These same chemical signals also affect behavior and the response to stress. Disruption of this communication network in any way, whether inherited or through drugs, toxic substances or surgery, exacerbates the diseases that these systems guard against: infectious, inflammatory, autoimmune and associated mood disorders.
    The clinical significance of these findings is likely to prove. They hold the promise of extending the range of therapeutic treatments available for various disorders, as drugs previously known to work primarily for nervous system problems are shown to be effective against immune maladies, and vice versa. They also help to substantiate the popularly held impression(still discounted in some medical circles)that our state of mind can influence how well we resist or recover from infectious or inflammatory diseases.
    The brain’s stress response system is activated in threatening situations. The immune system responds automatically to pathogens and foreign molecules. These two response systems are the body’s principal means for maintaining an internal steady state called homeostasis. A substantial proportion of human cellular machinery is dedicated to maintaining it.
    When homeostasis is disturbed or threatened, a repertoire of molecular, cellular and behavioral responses comes into play. These responses attempt to counteract the disturbing forces in order to reestablish a steady state. They can be specific to the foreign invader or a particular stress, or they can be generalized and nonspecific when the threat to homeostasis exceeds a certain threshold. The adaptive responses may themselves turn into stressors capable of producing disease. We are just beginning to understand the many ways in which the brain and the immune system are interdependent, how they help to regulate and counterregulate each other and how they themselves can malfunction and produce diseases.
Which of the following statements about clinical significance of the new findings can be best supported by the passage?
选项 A、The responsivity to stress is genetically determined.
B、The treatment of immune maladies can be consciously controlled.
C、Psychoactive drugs may in some cases be used to treat inflammatory diseases.
D、Social interactions can lessen psychological stress and alter immune responses.
答案C
解析 根据文中第三段的内容可知，这些研究成果的临床意义可能已经得到证实。它们有望扩大各种疾病的治疗范围，因为人们以前认为药物主要是在神经系统的医治方面具有疗效，如今表明医治免疫疾病也同样有效，而且反之亦然。它们还帮助证实了普遍持有的想法(在某些医学界仍然存在疑虑)，即我们的精神状态可以影响我们抵抗感染或炎症性疾病或从中恢复的程度。据此可知，对精神有影响的药物在某些情况下可以用于治疗炎症性疾病，这是文中支持的观点。C项正确。
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