Q18 - Orthodox medicine is ineffective at both ends

[Raymond.Keimer]

I'm confused with answer choice B and haggled between between B and C before I decided to skip it altogether.

Anyhow, I eliminated answer choice A because there was nothing in the stimulus to support the idea;
D because alternative medicine is free of unacceptable side effects as stated in the last sentence (correct me if I incorrectly assumed that alternative medicine is synonymous to medical treatment);
and E because it's clearly unwarranted. There is nothing in the stimulus to support the idea of what orthodox medicine is capable of in the future.

HELP!

[ohthatpatrick]

You're very much on the right track! This is an Inference question, so we're just meant to accept these facts and then see which answer choice we can best prove/support based only on those facts.

As you said,
(A) we have no way to support "bad faith". Even though we're told that alternative medicine has no effects at all, the practitioners might be telling their patients that (good faith) or the practitioners might be convinced that the alternative medicine DOES have good effects (also good faith). To prove bad faith, we need to know that the practitioners KNOW the alternative medicine does nothing but tell patients it WILL do something.

(B) We are told that orthodox treatments are largely ineffective when it comes to aches, pains, and allergies. We are also told that alternative treatments do NOTHING. They have NO effects at all. You can't be "effective" if you have no effects at all. So we can support (B). There is no orthodox or alternative treatment that is effective for many aches, pains, and allergies.

(C) This is contradicted by the final sentence, which says that alternative medicine has NO EFFECTS AT ALL. As we just stated, you can't be "effective" if you have no effects. (Technically, we could quibble about this claim because the "placebo effect" can be an effective treatment, even though the placebo has no effects ... that's an indirect sense of being "effective" ... but even still, nothing in the paragraph brings up the placebo effect, so we have no ammunition for supporting that alternative medicine IS sometimes effective)

(D) Too extreme! "No" effective treatments are free from bad side effects? How are we going to justify such a sweeping statement? The only time we get language referring to unacceptable side effects is within a sentence saying that "sometimes that happens and people turn to alternative medicine as a result".

(E) Can't prove the future!

Hope this helps.

[mornincounselor]

I was also stuck between B and C, but I felt C was a much better choice, here was my "in the moment" analysis:

B says that there are some conditions for which "no orthodox or alternative treatment is effective." But the argument only says "orthodox medicine is 'largely ineffective'" in treating some of the minor ailments, and that it has "yet to produce a cure" for some of the more serious ailments.

The argument leaves open the possibility that while largely ineffective the medicine can still be somewhat effective, and further I would argue that treating serious diseases effectively does not only include curing the disease. If orthodox medicine can alleviate the symptoms of these major diseases why does this not fall under the "effective" categorization.

C suggets to me that for some of these minor ailments time alone is sufficient to treat them and therefore alternative medicine (with no effect) can be effective as treatment.

I was really surprised to see I missed this question.

[zky]

I want to talk about choice D.
We can see that one of the reasons alternative medicine is free of such side effect is that not have effect at all so

*no effect→no side effect*

"because no effect is one reason can cause no side effect"

D said no effective medical is no side effect
"if any medical is effective it will have side effect"

*effect→side effect*

It's wrong negative. This is really confusing.