The proposal to extend clinical trials, which are routinely used as systematic tests of pharmaceutical innovations, t...

SarahA May 6, 2019

Clarify prior explanation

I really appreciate Naz’s helpful tip at the end of her explanation, but the explanation itself makes no sense to me at all. In the explanation we are told that the conclusion is based on the premise that we shouldn’t extend clinical trials to surgery because “there is no systematic way to test the new surgical procedures.” How does surgery being inherently harmful give us a way to gauge it’s effectiveness or? I dont see nhow something being inherently harmful is synonymous to something being comprised of a chemical formula. Please explain…the entire argument, preferably. I didn't think any of the answer choices were correct, and chose b, but only because it was the only chance that seemed somewhat reasonable. Thank you! I'm at an LR plateau and if I don't zero in on why I am getting these questions wrong I'm not going to improve.

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Ravi May 6, 2019

@msaber,

Happy to help. This argument is comparing surgery and medicine.
Regarding medicine, the argument contends that clinical trials are
necessary because we do not know how the medicine is going to react to
the human body. Regarding surgery, the argument contends that we do
not need these types of clinical trials because surgery is related to
the skills of the surgeon performing the operation.

We're tasked with identifying the flawed reasoning in the argument. In
looking at the stimulus, the claims about surgery are quite suspect.
The argument says that surgery is different from medicine since it is
based on skill, rather than the composition of the treatment. However,
we know that this isn't necessarily true; there are some types of
surgeries that are very risky, regardless of the level of skill of the
surgeons performing them. In looking at the stimulus, we see that the
language that the author uses to describe medicine and surgery. With
medicine, the author says that clinical trials are necessary because
the drug's efficacy only depends on its chemical composition. With
surgery, the argument says that surgical skill is transparently
related to the outcome of the surgery, but it doesn't ever say that
surgical skill is the only thing that the outcome is dependent upon.

From this, we know that there could be other things that affect the
outcome of a given surgery (such as the inherent risk or invasiveness
of the procedure) that could affect the outcome, so clinical trials
might actually be a good idea. The argument is mistaking one important
component of surgery (the skill of the surgeon) as being the only
factor that matters, which clearly isn't the case.

The question says, 'The reasoning in the argument is flawed because
the argument..."

(A) says, "does not consider that new surgical procedures might be
found to be intrinsically more harmful than the best treatment
previously available"

Perhaps the new surgical method is a very risky one. Even if the
person performing it is a really skilled surgeon, it does not mean
that other things cannot affect the probability of the surgery being
successful. (A) picks up on the flaw of the argument that we
identified, so it's the correct answer.

Does this make sense? Let us know if you have any other questions!

SarahA May 6, 2019

This is really great, thank you! I understand completely now.

Ravi May 7, 2019

@msaber, great! Let us know if you have any more questions!