1 . A few months ago, I got a terrible cold which ended in a cough that was hard to get rid of (摆脱). No matter how many different medicines I tried, I _________ couldn’t get rid of the cough. It made both my teaching and my life _________.

Then one day after class, a student came up to me and _________ traditional Chinese medicine. From her description, it seemed that Chinese medicine had magic power and could work _________. I was _________ because I knew so little about it and have never tried it before. _________ my cough got so much worse that I couldn’t sleep at night, so I decided to give it a _________. The Chinese doctor took my pulse and asked to see my _________, both of which were new experience to me because they are both nonexistent in Western medicine, where diagnosis (诊断) relies heavily on _________. Then the doctor gave me a scraping treatment known as “Gua Sha”. I was a little __________ at first because he used a smooth edged tool to scrape the skin on my neck and shoulders.

A few minutes later, the treatment started to produce a __________ effect and my body and mind began to sink deeper into __________. I didn’t feel much improvement in my __________ in the first couple of days, but after a few more regular visits to the doctor, my cough started to __________. Then within a matter of weeks, it was completely __________!

3 . “New and improved. “These words are put in so many marketing campaigns that we tend to accept them as linked. But many new drugs aren’t an improvement over the best existing drug for a given condition, and the fast drug-approval processes in recent years have added to the uncertainty about their advantages.

A recent report in the British Medical Journal, “New Drugs: Where Did We Go Wrong and What Can We Do Better? “Analyzed the issue. The authors looked at 216 drugs approved between 2011 and 2017:152 were newly developed, and 64 were existing medicine approved for new uses. Only 25%offered a major advantage over the established treatment, and fully 58%had no confirmed added benefit to reduce symptoms or improve health-related quality of life.

“This doesn’t mean there’s no added benefit, “lead author Wissler said. “It just means we have no positive proof. Either we have no studies or have studies not good enough. “Wissler and her co-authors work for a German institute which evaluates new treatments and advises on whether the country’s health care system should pay a premium(补贴)for them. Such organizations, known as health technology assessment(HTA)agencies, work a little differently in the US, says Sean Tunisia researcher in Baltimore: “If payers think a new drug isn’t better than an existing drug, these agencies will require that hospitals try the cheaper drug first.”

Germanys HTA demands trials to prove that a new treatment beats the existing standard. This isn’t always practical. For one thing, such studies can be expensive and time-consuming, with no guarantee of success. Secondly, it can discourage companies from attempting to develop new alternatives. This is already happening. Drug developers are increasingly focused on areas where there are no good treatments to compete with, such as rare diseases.

This lack of meaningful data to guide patients is a major point of Wissler’s paper. With accelerated approval, there are more products approved, with a greater amount of uncertainty about risks and benefits. But there are other solutions besides drug trials. One idea is to require postmarked studies to track the effectiveness of newly approved drugs—a step too often neglected.