Listening: Health Answer Key

HEALTH

1. You are going to listen to an interview with Joanne Fullerton, a journalist who spent a week at a retreat centre to find out whether giving up food can really improve your health. Tick the correct sentences and correct the wrong ones.

a) You only drink vegetable juice on the retreat. F You drink fruit and vegetable juice on the retreat.

b) Joanne wasn't looking forward to the experience. T

c) Louise worked at the retreat centre. F Louise was doing the retreat.

d) Fasting helps your body get rid of toxins. T

e) Joanne felt fine on day two of the retreat. F Joanne had an awful headache and felt as if she was getting a cold on the day two of the retreat.

f) The fifth day was easier than the third day. T

g) Joanne has changed her diet since the retreat. T

2. You are going to hear four people giving their opinion about alternative medicine. Fill in the blanks with the missing words.

1          Traditional medicine only treats the symptoms of an illness, not the cause. If you’ve got a headache a traditional doctor will say, ‘Take an aspirin.’ But if you come and see me I’ll try to find out why you’re getting these headaches. Is it a problem of diet or stress or what? We treat the whole person, and try to change their lifestyle. We don’t just treat the illness.

2          I’d been trying to give up on and off for years. I’d tried everything, nicotine patches, pills, chewing gum – you name it, I tried it. But nothing worked and I was still on twenty a day. It was a friend of mine who said to me to try acupuncture. I must admit I didn’t think it would work and I was a bit nervous about the needles, but it did work. I haven’t had one now for nearly three months. If anyone asked me now how to stop I’d say acupuncture straight away.

3          I think if it’s anything external then that’s fine – acupuncture, or osteopathy – I mean, they’re called alternative medicine, but they’ve been well studied – and they use techniques that have been used for thousands of years – that’s OK. If I had, for example, a bad back, I’d probably use an osteopath myself. But what I’m really against is taking any form of medication that hasn’t been studied and that applies to most homeopathic medicine, I’m afraid. I think they’re dangerous. They’re not based on research, they haven’t been studied properly, and we doctors see a lot of damage done as a result of them. If one of my patients tells me they’re taking homeopathic medicine, well – I try to persuade them not to.

4          I don’t have any problems at all with massage and things like that, in fact it’s essential for people like me. It’s not that I don’t believe in homeopathic medicine, but the problem is you don’t know exactly what’s in a tablet. Obviously I have to be really careful about what I take, as you can imagine, because of all the drug tests. I could be taking a banned substance without realizing, that’s the problem.