英语高级视听说下原文.docxVIP

UNIT3 A PILL TO FORGET(CBS) If there were something you could take after experiencing a painful or traumatic event that would permanently weaken your memory of what had just happened, would you take it? As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, it’s an idea that may not be so far off, and that has some critics alarmed, and some trauma victims filled with hope. I couldnt get my body to stop shaking. I was trembling, constantly trembling. Memories of it would just come back, reoccurring over and over and over, subway conductor Beatriz Arguedas recalls. Last Sept. 30, Beatriz was driving her normal route on the Red Line in Boston when one of her worst fears came to pass: Upon entering one of the busiest stations, a man jumped in front of my train, to commit suicide, she explains. Beatriz saw the man jump. We sort of made eye contact and then I felt the thud from him hitting the train and then the crackling sound underneath the train and, then, of course, my heart starts thumping, she recalls. She came into our emergency room afterwards, very upset. No physical injury. Entirely a psychological trauma, says Dr. Roger Pitman, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School who has studied and treated patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, for 25 years. Theyre caught up so much with this past event that its constantly in their mind, Pitman explains. Theyre living it over and over and over as if its happening again. And they just cant get involved in real life. When Beatriz arrived in the emergency room, Pitman enrolled her in an experimental study of a drug called propranolol, a medication commonly used for high blood pressure ... and unofficially for stage fright. Pitman thought it might do something almost magical – trick Beatriz’s brain into making a weaker memory of the event she had just experienced. In the study, which is still under way, half the subjects get propranolol; half get a placebo. Asked whether he knows if Beatriz got the drug or the placebo, Dr.