单项选择题

People’s attitude toward drugs has become to resemble an emotional roller coaster, careening wildly from dizzy heights of pharmacologic faith to gloomy terror over drug hazards. A host of dreaded killers that had tyrannized the world for centuries can now be cured. That is a cause for some to regard drugs as "miraculous". On the other hand, there are hundreds of pitifully deformed babies born of mothers who had taken thalidomide — the very thought of them causes terror.
What is the sensible attitude toward drugs
I think the first thing to think about is the differences between drugs and wonder drugs. The antibiotics, such as penicillin, can really cure certain bacterial diseases. On the other hand, the major diseases threatening Americans today are cancer, stroke, hypertension, coronary disease, arthritis and psychoses. Against them, the doctor’s bag of tricks is limited. He has no wonder drug.
Of course, many patients suffering from these illnesses can be improved by taking drugs and a few can be dramatically helped. But no drug has cured a single case of schizophrenia or rheumatoid arthritis, in the way that penicillin can cure pneumonia or meningococcal meningitis.
So the first important lesson is not to expect too much from drugs. Too many patients exert unholy pressures on doctors to prescribe for every symptom, even when such treatment is unwarranted or dangerous.
Unfortunately, the medical profession is guilty of some complicity here. The patient who demands a shot of penicillin for every sniffle and sneeze may be given the injection by a reluctant physician because he is certain that if he does not, the patient will search until he or she finds a doctor who will.
More important, the physician is apt to be a willing collaborator in over-medication because he, too, has been oversold on drugs. He is rarely at a loss for a remedy that might be just what the patient needs. Doctors want their patients to get well. They also derive feelings of power and ego-satisfaction from the ability to prescribe the latest drugs.
At the other extreme is the patient who is suspicious of all medications. In the category are the patients who never take an aspirin tablet because they believe that "every aspirin you take leaves a scar on the lining of your stomach".
Without doubt, such ill-advised behavior is at times traceable to lurid accounts of drug dangers. Not long ago, when one antidepressant drug was temporarily withdrawn from the market by the Food and Drug Administration, radio and television stations in New York carried stories about that. Patients were advised by commentators not to take any medication at all. The resulting hysteria in hundreds of patients was as real as it was predictable.

It can be learned from the passage that ().

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