Word: snakes
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Walking tours, which snake through nearly every borough and neighborhood, have long been popular in England. But with Britain's rail system beset with problems and grueling traffic tie-ups almost the norm, their appeal has grown. More of a leisurely stroll than a hike, the walks usually run two hours, and at a price of 5[Pounds](about $7.50), and 3.5[Pounds] for seniors and students, they are a great bargain in this pricey country. And they are catching on beyond England. Similar excursions are thriving in Paris, Rome, Prague, New York City and San Francisco...
...sell snake oil to TIME's science journalists. Or cold fusion, or any other unproven notion. "We pride ourselves on being sticklers for science, rooted firmly in the mainstream," says assistant managing editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt, whose hard-nosed science team produced this week's installment of Innovators, our monthly series on 100 people with breakthrough ideas. It was quite a departure for Phil's reporters and writers to venture into the realm of alternative medicine, where hopes proliferate and proof is often sketchy. Yet the field is booming because millions of Americans swear these therapies have given them relief...
...consult half a dozen specialists and get half a dozen conflicting opinions. "Well, of course," Dr. Toby Brown, a Manassas, Va., radiologist says impatiently, "it's not as if medicine is a science." Hence the appeal of alternative medicine: aromatherapy, homeopathy, ginkgo biloba. Proponents may be crusading scientists or snake-oil salesmen, but either way, their pitch falls on eager ears: each year Americans spend some $27 billion on so-called complementary medicine. "One lesson of the alternative health-care movement," McCall warns, "is that the public is not going to wait for doctors to get it together...
...human brain may be a sophisticated thing, but there is an awful lot of ancient programming still etched into it. For "Martin," 21, a dental student in London, Ontario, his fear of snakes is so overwhelming that he stapled together pages in a textbook to avoid flipping to a photo of a snake. He often wakes with nightmares that he is sitting in a bar or a stadium and suddenly sees a snake slithering toward him. "It's odd," he says, "because I'm not in situations where I would ever see snakes...
...phobia. The world is a scary place, and young kids are inherently fearful until they start to figure it out. If you are living with a generalized sense of danger, it can be profoundly therapeutic to find a single object on which to deposit all that unformed fear--a snake, a spider, a rat. A specific phobia becomes a sort of backfire for fear, a controlled blaze that prevents other blazes from catching. "The thinking mind seeks out a rationale for the primitive mind's unexplained experiences," says psychologist Steven Phillipson, clinical director of the Center for Cognitive-Behavioral Psychotherapy...