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Chapter 8
Belief in Ineffective "Alternative" Health Practices
22
Psychology
Undergraduate 4
12/15/2013

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Cards

Term
medicine and health
Definition
No area has been plagued by questionable, erroneous, and often harmful beliefs than the field of _____.
Term
ten billion dollars
Definition
It has been estimated that Americans spend _____ per year on quack remedies.
Term
tempting
Definition
Part of the reason that erroneous beliefs about health are so rampant is that what they offer is so ______.
Term
hope
Definition
Alternative medical practices offer _____ when the limits of conventional medicine are exceeded.
Term
self-limited
Definition
Roughly 50% of illnesses for which people seek medical help are ______ - i.e., they are cured by the body's own healing processes without assistance from medical science.
Term
temporary periods of relief
Definition
In ailments that are not self-limited, _____ give rise to erroneous perceptions of a treatment's effectiveness.
Term
controlled experimentation
Definition
Many advocates of alternative health practices completely reject _____ as a valid means for arriving at the truth.
Term
vague improvements
Definition
It is easier to believe that a treatment is effective in bringing about _____ in symptomatology than in effecting a genuine cure.
Term
ambiguous
Definition
The more _____ the criterion, the easier it is to detect evidence of success.
Term
ought to be true
Definition
We believe certain things because they _____.
Term
plausible
Definition
This tendency to rely heavily on what seems ______ has contributed to a number of questionable beliefs about health.
Term
Representativeness Heuristic
Definition
Effects should resemble their causes, instances should resemble the categories of which they are members, and, more generally, like belongs with like.
Term
cause
Definition
Erroneous belief that the symptoms of a disease out to resemble or in some way suggest its _____.
Term
"law of simila"
Definition
Samuel Hahneman's theory that every disease could be cured by administering to the sick individual whatever substance produced similar symptoms in a healthy person.
Term
materia medica
Definition
Hahneman's reference books.
Term
"law of infinitesimals"
Definition
Hahneman's theory that the less concentrated the remedies administered to the sick, the more they would help alleviate the sick person's symptomatology.
Term
"Lane's Kink"
Definition
Dr. Lane believed that he had spotted a location in the colon in which the flow of waste slowed down, and so he developed a surgical procedure to cut it out and speed up elimination.
Term
Holistic Medicine
Definition
An orientation toward health and medicine that rejects or deemphasizes what is considered to be a materialistic and reductionistic bias on the part of conventional "Western" Medicine.
Term
Holists
Definition
emphasize the "whole person" rather than the local cause of dysfunction, and many problems are thought to stem from a lack of "balance" among mind, body, and spirit.
Term
evaluated adequately
Definition
Holistic practitioners make a number of claims about how the mind can influence the body that cannot be _____ at the present time.
Term
Psychoimmunology
Definition
Researchers in this area are concerned with mapping out the biochemical pathways that connect the brain and the immune system, and thus with how mental states might influence a person's health.
Term
most extreme prediction
Definition
Very few of the _____ of any emerging field turn out to be true. (Author's prediction about psychoimmunology)
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