The proposal to extend clinical trials, which are routinely used as systematic tests of pharmaceutical innovations, t...
PartvAugust 2, 2020
Answer Choice A
I perused the reasoning but still found option A to support the conclusion that these trials "should not be implemented especially since "they are intrinsically more harmful"
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The passage is saying that clinical trials, which are currently used to test drugs, should not be expanded to include testing new surgical procedures because, unlike drugs, the effectiveness of surgical procedures depends on the skill of the surgeons. We are asked to find the flaw in this argument.
(A) "does not consider that new surgical procedures might be found to be intrinsically more harmful than the best treatment previously available"
(A) is saying that the argument in the passage recommends against extending clinical trials to include surgeries based only on a comparison to drugs and fails to take into consideration that having clinical trials for surgeries may uncover that some new surgical procedures are worse than the previously existing treatments. Uncovering these would allow the procedures to be abandoned before being widely practiced, which is ultimately beneficial. In other words, (A) implies that the proposal to extend clinical trials to include surgeries should be implemented because it could allow for new surgical procedures that are worse than the best previously existing treatments to be recognized and abandoned before becoming widespread.
In your post, you state that the clinical trials "are intrinsically more harmful." However, it is important to recognize that this phrase in (A) refers to some new surgical procedures being intrinsically more harmful than other existing treatments, not to the clinical trials being intrinsically more harmful.
Does that make sense? Please let us know if you have any other questions!
