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      考研英语水平的进步，不仅要记单词，还需要阅读外语文献等资料。接下来，小编为2024考研者们，整理出——2024考研英语同源外刊5月:太多人吃了太多药，供考生参考。

2024考研英语同源外刊5月:太多人吃了太多药

As a pharmacist in a big hospital in Adelaide, Emily Reeve would often see patients overwhelmed by the number of drugs they took each day. “They’d say ‘I take so many medicines that I rattle when I walk’,” she recalls. And she worried that some of the medications these patients were on seemed useless, or even harmful.

作为阿德莱德一家大医院的药剂师，艾米丽·里夫经常看到病人因每天服用大量药物而不堪重负。她回忆道：“他们会说‘我吃了太多药，走路时都会咯咯作响’。” 她还担心，这些患者服用的一些药物似乎毫无用处，甚至有害。

Dr Reeve’s patients are not unusual, at least in the rich world. About 15% of people in England take five or more prescription drugs every day. So do 20% of Americans and Canadians aged 40-79.

里夫医生的病人并非个例，至少在发达国家是这样。在英国，大约15%的人每天服用五种或五种以上的处方药。40-79岁的美国人和加拿大人中有20%也是如此。

Since the old tend to be sicker, the number of pills a person pops tends to rise over time. Of Americans who are 65 or older, two-thirds take at least five medications each day. In Canada, a quarter of over-65s take ten or more.

由于老年人往往病情更重，一个人服用的药物数量往往会随着时间的推移而增加。在65岁或以上的美国人中，三分之二的人每天至少服用五种药物。在加拿大，四分之一的65岁以上的人每天服用10种甚至更多的药。

Not all those prescriptions are beneficial. Half of older Canadians take at least one that is, in some way, inappropriate. A review of overprescribing in England in 2021 concluded that at least 10% of prescriptions handed out by family doctors, pharmacists and the like should probably not have been issued. And even properly prescribed drugs have side effects. The more medicines someone takes, the more they will experience.

并非所有这些处方都是有益的。一半的加拿大老年人至少服用一种在某种程度上不合适的药物。2021年，英国一份关于过度处方的审查得出结论，家庭医生、药剂师等开具的处方中，至少有10%的药是不应该开出的。即使处方合理的药物也会有副作用。一个人吃的药越多，他的副作用就越多。

“Polypharmacy”, as doctors call it, imposes a big drag on health. A recent study at a hospital in Liverpool found that nearly one in five hospital admissions was caused by adverse reactions to drugs.

医生们称之为“综合用药”，这对健康造成了很大的影响。利物浦一家医院近期的一项研究发现，近五分之一的住院患者是由药物不良反应引起的。

The Lown Institute, an American think-tank, reckons that, between 2020 and 2030. medication overload in America could cause more than 150.000 premature deaths and 4.5m hospital admissions.

美国智库洛恩研究所估计，在2020年至2030年间，美国的药物过量将导致超过15万人过早死亡，450万人住院。

Getting people off drugs is unfamiliar terrain for modern health systems, which are mostly set up to put patients on them. But that is beginning to change.

让人们摆脱药物对现代卫生系统来说是一个陌生的领域，现代卫生系统大多是为了让患者服用药物而建立的。但这种情况正在开始改变。

Doctors, pharmacists and nurses are setting up “deprescribing networks” to try to spread the word. (Dr Reeve, now at Monash University, in Melbourne, runs one in Australia.) England’s National Health Service published a plan to reduce overprescribing in 2021. The first international conference on it took place last year, in Denmark.

医生、药剂师和护士正在建立“减少开药网络”，试图传播这一信息。(目前就职于墨尔本莫纳什大学的里夫博士在澳大利亚开办了一个。)英国国民健康服务局在2021年公布了一项减少过度开药的计划，去年在丹麦召开了首次国际会议。

Excessive pill-popping burdens patients in several ways. One is the sheer logistics of it all. “People feel like their entire lives revolve around their medications,” says Michael Steinman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The more drugs someone takes, the greater the chances are that some of them will be taken wrongly.

过量服药在几个方面给患者带来了负担。一个是这一切的纯粹逻辑。加州大学旧金山分校的医学教授迈克尔·斯坦曼说：“人们觉得自己的整个生活都围绕着药物。” 一个人服用的药物越多，其中一些药物被错误服用的可能性就越大。

Other problems are more straightforwardly medical. Some patients end up taking several drugs that affect the same biological pathway. One example is anticholinergics, which suppress the activity of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter.

其他问题则更直接地与医学有关。一些患者会服用几种影响同一生物途径的药物。抗胆碱能药物就是一个例子，它能抑制乙酰胆碱(一种神经递质)的活性。

Several drugs, including some anti-allergy pills, anti-incontinence drugs and tricyclic antidepressants, work this way. But doctors are not always aware of that, says Dr Reeve.

有些药物(包括一些抗过敏药、抗失禁药和三环类抗抑郁药)以同样的方式起作用。里夫博士说，但医生们并不总能意识到这一点。

Medication overload persists for several reasons. One, particularly in America, is advertising, which oversells the benefits of medicines, says Dr Farrell. Lack of unified personal health records is another. A cardiologist may prescribe drugs for a patient without knowing what the doctor treating his lungs may have put him on.

药物过量问题的持续存在有几个原因。法雷尔博士说，其中之一是广告(尤其是在美国)，会过分夸大药物的好处。另一个原因是缺乏统一的个人健康记录。心脏病科研者可能在不知道治疗其肺部疾病的医生给他开了什么药的情况下给病人开了药。

Perhaps the most common reason is that patients are not told when to stop taking a drug, or forget. In America one in five patients who are given gabapentin, a potent painkiller, after surgery are still taking it 90 days later (the recommended maximum is four weeks). Often prescriptions are renewed automatically by other doctors, who see them on a patient’s notes and assume they have to be continued.

也许较常见的原因是患者没有被告知何时停止服药，或者忘记了何时停药。在美国，每五名术后服用加巴喷丁(一种强效止痛药)的患者中就有一人在90天后仍在服用(建议较长服用时间为四周)。通常情况下，其他医生在看到病人的病历后，会自动更新处方，并认为必须继续用药。

Many doctors presume that, in any case, patients are not particularly interested in stopping their medicines. That is probably wrong: studies from a number of countries show that eight out of ten patients are willing to give up a drug if their doctor advises them to do so.

许多医生认为，无论如何，病人都不会对停药特别感兴趣。这可能是错误的：来自多个国家的研究表明，如果医生建议，80%的患者愿意停止用药。

But those doctors face problems of their own. Money for de-prescribing studies is scant. Drug firms, the main sponsors of clinical trials, are not interested, for obvious reasons.

但这些医生也面临着自己的问题。用于取消处方研究的资金很少。原因显而易见，作为临床试验的主要赞助商，制药公司对此不感兴趣。

 

重难点词汇：

terrain [təˈreɪn] n. 地面;地形;地势

potent [ˈpoʊtnt] adj. 强势的;强有力的;影响巨大的

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