Q19 - The proposal to extend clinical

[dylancox_12]

I can see how A is correct. However, I chose D and will show my reasoning in the hopes someone will show me where I went wrong. I picked D due to the line "a correctly prescribed drug depends for its effectiveness ONLY on the drug's composition, whereas the effectiveness of even the most appropriate surgical procedure is transparently related to the skills of the surgeon who uses it." So the author is arguing essentially there is a dissimilarity between drugs and surgery, because whereas a drug works based on only 1 variable, a bunch of variables affect whether surgery works. Now to me, it seems a bit extreme to find this dissimilarity without providing scientific evidence. It seems like common knowledge that a drug's effectiveness could be affected by a LOT of things (e.g. health of the person who took the drug, what type of diet that person was eating, etc.) So that was my reasoning for saying the author described a dissimilarity without backing it up with evidence. I saw this as being a stronger answer than A, which as you pointed out doesn't actually show a flaw in the author's argument.

[bbirdwell]

I saw this as being a stronger answer than A, which as you pointed out doesn't actually show a flaw in the author's argument.

I wrote that a long time ago, so it's hard to jump back into my old thought process, but I don't think that's what I meant. I think I was trying to point out that some "flaw" answers really damage the conclusion of arguments, and some don't -- instead, they disrupt the chain of reasoning along the way.

Let me check this one out one more time and see how it flows...

Looking at it now, I have to disagree with my earlier claim that the "ideal" choice did not exist. I think A is an ideal choice.

Regarding D:

We are to take premises as facts. It is presented as fact in the argument that correctly prescribed drugs rely ONLY on composition. We must evaluate the argument as if this were fact. The author need not provide "scientific evidence."

It's a test of logical reasoning, not factual debate. So, we take facts as facts on the LSAT and evaluate their connection to the claims made by authors. The claim in this instance being that clinical trials should not apply to surgery.

Now, just to look at the argument and the correct answer once more:

Conclusion:
NO trials for surgery

premises:
surgery different from drugs
correctly prescribed --> composition
good surgery --> skills of surgeon

Hmm. So the author's only real point of evidence is that the skills of the surgeon affect the procedure, and therefore clinical trials for surgery could not be "systematic."

(A) When a choice begins with "fails/does not consider," all we have to do is consider the statement. And if that weakens the argument's conclusion or reasoning, then we've found our answer. Here, (A) says "what if a new surgery is INTRINSICALLY harmful?"

Well, then it wouldn't matter how good the surgeon was. This consideration disrupts the essential connection the author was attempting to make, and even leads us toward the opposite conclusion. If a surgery can itself be harmful, clinical trials would seem to be valuable.

Hope that helps.

[slimjimsquinn]

I first misinterpreted the flaw to be C), that the author assumes the surgeon's skills remain unchanged through out a surgeon's life.

I assumed the argument was making an un-comparable analogy. A pill's composition can't be compared to a surgeon's skill--the composition seems more un-changable as opposed to surgical skills, which I'm sure can be more quickly improved.

I still can't understand why the answer is C) as opposed to A). How does A) put surgeons' skills and pill composition on equal footing?

Sorry to belabor a question that's already explained. It's just that I'm very attached to C).

[dean.won]

I saw this as being a stronger answer than A, which as you pointed out doesn't actually show a flaw in the author's argument.

I wrote that a long time ago, so it's hard to jump back into my old thought process, but I don't think that's what I meant. I think I was trying to point out that some "flaw" answers really damage the conclusion of arguments, and some don't -- instead, they disrupt the chain of reasoning along the way.

Let me check this one out one more time and see how it flows...

Looking at it now, I have to disagree with my earlier claim that the "ideal" choice did not exist. I think A is an ideal choice.

Regarding D:

We are to take premises as facts. It is presented as fact in the argument that correctly prescribed drugs rely ONLY on composition. We must evaluate the argument as if this were fact. The author need not provide "scientific evidence."

It's a test of logical reasoning, not factual debate. So, we take facts as facts on the LSAT and evaluate their connection to the claims made by authors. The claim in this instance being that clinical trials should not apply to surgery.

Now, just to look at the argument and the correct answer once more:

Conclusion:
NO trials for surgery

premises:
surgery different from drugs
correctly prescribed --> composition
good surgery --> skills of surgeon

Hmm. So the author's only real point of evidence is that the skills of the surgeon affect the procedure, and therefore clinical trials for surgery could not be "systematic."

(A) When a choice begins with "fails/does not consider," all we have to do is consider the statement. And if that weakens the argument's conclusion or reasoning, then we've found our answer. Here, (A) says "what if a new surgery is INTRINSICALLY harmful?"

Well, then it wouldn't matter how good the surgeon was. This consideration disrupts the essential connection the author was attempting to make, and even leads us toward the opposite conclusion. If a surgery can itself be harmful, clinical trials would seem to be valuable.

Hope that helps.

I understand where the chain of logic is weakened but..

Are we supposed to assume clinical trials currently only apply to medicinal drugs??

Also, if a certain surgery was intrinsically harmful why would we assume that clinical trials of that surgery is valuable? So that we can make it less harmful by practicing??

Thx

[griffin.811]

I understand where the chain of logic is weakened but..

Are we supposed to assume clinical trials currently only apply to medicinal drugs??

Also, if a certain surgery was intrinsically harmful why would we assume that clinical trials of that surgery is valuable? So that we can make it less harmful by practicing??

Thx

So we don't have to assume that the trials are only applied to medicinal drugs, we just need to take their word that the trials are not already used for surgeries.


So if we step away for a sec and look at the big picture, the argument is that: Trials used to assure the safety of medicinal drugs should not be applied to surgeries. Why? Because this process would not help make surgeries any safer since the safety/effectiveness of surgeries is based on the SKILL LEVEL of the SURGEON, and not the the SURGERY ITSELF.

Pretty much, trials only help in situations where there MAYBE something wrong with the actual product itself (and not the person administering it)

The flaw is that the author assumes that there cant be anything wrong with the surgery itself. Meaning that if a surgery is unsuccessful, it MUST BE because the surgeon made a mistake.

But what if the procedure itself just doesnt work as expected? The surgeon may have followed all the steps precisely, but this is just a BAD SURGICAL PROCEDURE.

Since this is a posibility, trials may be helpful in ensuring the saftey of those to undergo this procedure. Maybe 1000 of these procedures need to be successfully tested on monkey's to ensure the surgery works as it should, before we move to trying this with people.

In this case trials would definitely help promote the safety of surgeries.

HTH, if any questions let me know!

Also D is wrong because that isn't a flaw IMO. If I say basketball is different than football, but give no scientific evidence to back my statement, is my argument flawed? Not for that reason anyway. Maybe its flawed because it gives NO SUPPORTING EVIDENCE, but the evidence certantly does not need to be SCIENTIFIC. (And even this may not be a flaw)

[WaltGrace1983]

This is a tough flaw question, definitely.

Medical procedures are often extended to pharmaceutical innovations
+
There is a crucial difference between pharmaceutical innovations and surgical procedures though: while pharmaceutical innovations rely only on the drugs composition...
+
Effectiveness of surgical procedures is on skills of the surgeon
→
Clinical trials should not be extended to medical procedures

You may be able to get away with analyzing this argument with only the 3rd premise and the conclusion yet I think it would be quite unrealistic to think of this as the argument on the fly. I know I couldn't but some of you probably could. I did not have a solid understanding of the flaw going into the answer choices. I thought something along the lines of, "well just because we use clinical trials for drugs and surgeries are obviously different, does this mean that we should't use the clinical trials for surgeries too?"

I honestly have little rationality for eliminating (B) and (E). If someone understands these two answer choices more than me then I would appreciate it but these are just simply so off the mark that it is hard to explain exactly why they are wrong. The point is that there is absolutely no inkling of "crudeness" of the proposal or "good faith" going on at all in the stimulus. It is really hard to say much more than that.

(D) is wrong because scientific evidence is simply not needed. The "dissimilarity" that is happening within the argument is the one between the effectiveness of a medicinal drug and the effectiveness of a medical procedure. The author cites this dissimilarity but it may not even be possible to have medical evidence to back up the "skills of a surgeon."

(C) is a very interesting answer choice but ultimately wrong because there is no indication that this is ever assumed. Perhaps more importantly, even if it was assumed, the flaw does not hinge on a stagnancy/alterability of a surgeon's skills. The flaw is that the argument is analyzing two different things and saying that, because they are different, the clinical trials used on one thing should not be used on the other.

(A) is a very interesting answer choice too but, unlike (C), it is the correct one. The argument is saying that we should not extend clinical trials to surgical procedures. Yet (A) is rightly pointing out that perhaps these clinical trials will have some benefit that the argument is overlooking. This answer choice posits the possibility that we could discover, through clinical trials, that some medical procedures are "intrinsically more harmful." In other words, it doesn't matter about the "skills of a surgeon." Even if he/she was the best surgeon in the world, (A) is telling us that these clinical trials could still make it known the shortcomings of a surgical procedure.

I know that might be tough to follow but I hope it helps

[misseliz.davidson]

Just wondering what E would even mean in the context of this question. How would it work here if the question was slightly different, but with the same content and general idea.

[economienda]

There is another aspect all of you are ignoring.

The author argues that clinical trials used as systematic tests need not be applied to NEW surgical procedures BECAUSE surgical procedures are different from the drugs that currently use those systematic tests.

But, in his premise, is he referring to NEW surgical procedures or to CURRENT surgical procedures? This is not clear based on the diction in his premise.

His conclusion is strictly about NEW surgical procedures, so his premise MUST be comparing NEW surgical procedures for the conclusion to follow.

What if the NEW surgical procedures are different from the CURRENT surgical procedures, and are the same as the drug's composition? That is, What if the NEW surgical procedures' effectiveness is also based on its composition? His conclusion would not follow.

(A) takes advantage of this ambiguity in the author's premise by asserting that NEW surgical procedures, which the author refers to in his conclusion, are actually similar in the one important respect the author contends the drugs and (assuming NEW) surgical procedures are different.

[kjsmit02]

Just wondering what E would even mean in the context of this question. How would it work here if the question was slightly different, but with the same content and general idea.

I'm having a lot of trouble grasping this one, and am way off. I thought that if anything, A strengthens the argument. If the proposal to extend clinical trials to NEW surgical procedures shouldn't be implemented, and if these new procedures were more harmful than what's currently available,wasn't he was justified in not implementing the trials on them(the new surgical procedures)? So then, the fact that he didn't consider this strength would be the flaw?

[ohthatpatrick]

This chain got really long, so I'm deleting a lot of older posts and putting a complete explanation here.

Question Type: Flaw

Argument Core:

Conc:
We should not have clinical trials for new surgical procedures

(why?)

Prem:
We have clinical trials for medicinal drugs, but surgical procedures and medicinal drugs are different:
- drugs work or don't work based on their chemical composition
vs.
- the effectiveness of a surgical procedure has a lot to do with the surgeon who uses it

======

Here's where we should try to think of Assumptions or Potential Objections.

The author seems to be assuming that "if something's effectiveness is largely contingent on the person who uses it, then that something shouldn't be subjected to clinical trials."

When it comes to Potential Objections, we might say, "just because surgical procedures are different from drugs, why does that mean we shouldn't have clinical trials for surgical procedures?"

My best friend for Assumption Family questions is what I call the "anti-conclusion". If I'm somewhat stumped by the argument (or if I just want to remind myself what the key issue is that we're debating in the conclusion), I simply say the opposite of the conclusion.

Anti-Conc:
We SHOULD have clinical trials for surgical procedures.

If an answer choice gives me an idea that helps me argue that, I can weaken this author's argument.

=== answer choices ====

Most of us take a first pass through these answers and don't 'click' with any of them. Nothing really fits our most probable prediction, "takes for granted that if something's effectiveness is significantly related to the individual user then that something is not a good candidate for clinical trials".

So, I just take a 2nd pass through the answer choices asking myself a couple key questions for each answer choice:
1. Is this true? (did the author really do / not do this?)
2. If so, does it matter to the author's argument?

(A) True, the author never considered this. Does it matter? Sure ... if a surgical procedure was found (via clinical trial) to be intrinsically worse than the best treatment previously available, then we would say "No thanks, new surgical procedure. We're not going to use you."

This is an example of why we SHOULD do clinical trials on new surgical procedures. This would help me argue against the author's conclusion and weaken it. So it's relevant.

This sidesteps the author's premise concern about the effectiveness of a procedure varying based on the skill of the surgeon.

By saying that a procedure might be intrinsically worse than an available treatment, you're saying "the new procedure sucks! Even in the hands of the most skilled surgeon, it's inherently worse than other options."

So a clinical trial could help us find that out and we would benefit by that knowledge by NOT implementing that new procedure.

Even though the effectiveness of a procedure may vary based on the skill of a surgeon, clinical trials could still be useful in weeding out the absolute stinkballs that would be inferior to other treatments.

(B) True, but does this hurt the author's conclusion or deal with his evidence?

Here's a quick example of what (B) would be describing:

Some scientists have proposed flying to Mars with a spacecraft that could re-fuel by using atmospheric chemicals on Mars. But this proposal is clearly worthless. After all, the scientists do not tell us which atmospheric chemicals would be useful or how the spacecraft would convert those chemicals into fuel.

We could accuse this author of doing something resembling (B). We might say, "Whoa, there. Don't completely reject their proposal. This is just the early brainstorming phase. They don't know exactly how we'd do the re-fueling yet, so their proposal is worded in a deliberately crude way. They welcome more specific ideas / concerns about what would be involved to bring the idea to fruition."

(C) The author does not do this. Whenever I see "assumes" / "takes for granted" / "presumes", I look out for the same dangerous extreme wording we see in Necessary Assumption (since those three phrases all just mean the same thing as Necessary Assumption).

Does the author really need to assume that an individual surgeon's skills remain identical throughout her life? Of course not.

(D) The author does do this. He describes a dissimilarity between drugs and surgical procedures. He does not cite scientific evidence for that dissimilarity. But is that a reasoning problem?

I have no problem accepting that drugs are little bits of chemicals, whereas surgical procedures are tools/processes that could require a human to perform them.

I don't need scientific evidence for understanding that difference. It's common sense. If I told you that heartbeats and drumbeats are dissimilar because your heart beats automatically whereas you would have to use your own volition to play drums, that's just common sense.

Remember, an answer only intrigues us if it helps us argue against the author's conclusion, if it helps us argue that we SHOULD have clinical trials for surgical procedures.

With (A), I had a way to make that counterargument: "we might weed out the terrible procedures that would be harmful in ANY surgeon's hands".

With (D), what would I say? "we should have clinical trials because you haven't scientifically proven to me that skill is more important in a surgical procedure's effectiveness than it is for a drug's effectiveness?"

(E) I don't see how this could ever be a real flaw LSAT could test. But it's a little bit like (B) and the Mars example I provided. It describes trashing someone who had a well-intentioned idea ... it's saying "why were you so mean/decisive? didn't you recognize that the person had good intentions?"

So the correct answer choice is (A), and to me it 'clicks' as long as you're hunting for an answer that would help you argue against the author's conclusion.

If you're looking for a reason to argue that we SHOULD have clinical trials for new surgical procedures, then (A) gives us a decent reason.

Hope this helps.

#officialexplanation

[uhdang]

There is another aspect all of you are ignoring.

The author argues that clinical trials used as systematic tests need not be applied to NEW surgical procedures BECAUSE surgical procedures are different from the drugs that currently use those systematic tests.

But, in his premise, is he referring to NEW surgical procedures or to CURRENT surgical procedures? This is not clear based on the diction in his premise.

His conclusion is strictly about NEW surgical procedures, so his premise MUST be comparing NEW surgical procedures for the conclusion to follow.

What if the NEW surgical procedures are different from the CURRENT surgical procedures, and are the same as the drug's composition? That is, What if the NEW surgical procedures' effectiveness is also based on its composition? His conclusion would not follow.

(A) takes advantage of this ambiguity in the author's premise by asserting that NEW surgical procedures, which the author refers to in his conclusion, are actually similar in the one important respect the author contends the drugs and (assuming NEW) surgical procedures are different.

Hm.. the argument is talking about extending clinical trials to new surgical procedures from the beginning to the end. I don't see anything about the current surgical procedures, so can't really understand what we are all ignoring... Can you elaborate on it?

[jeff.wongkachi]

Gonna take a stab at this one.

Basically, the proposal to extend clinical trials for new surgical procedures should not be implemented despite the fact that they are often used as systematic tests in pharmaceutical innovations. This is because the two things are different in one very important way. A correctly prescribed drug only depends on its composition for its effectiveness. Conversely, even in the case of the best possible surgical procedure (thus, best case possible for the argument), it's transparently (obviously) related to the skills of the surgeon who uses the procedure.

So the person is basically saying because there's a human element here an effective/good surgery isn't really determined by the surgical procedure, but moreso on the skills of the surgeon, so we shouldn't go with the proposal since the trials aren't really relevant to surgical procedures like they are for pharmaceuticals.

A) Ah, but this doesn't really consider that we could find out that the new surgical procedures are inherently more flawed (harmful) than the old best available procedures. This gives us a great reason for why clinical trials for the surgical procedures should be extended -- because there's the possibility that the surgery itself is inherently flawed even before it gets to the surgeon.

Honestly, even the first part "Does not consider that new surgical procedures might be found to be more intrinsically harmful..." is a giveaway that this is a strong answer choice.

[t.vu1986]

Just wondering what E would even mean in the context of this question. How would it work here if the question was slightly different, but with the same content and general idea.

I believe what [E] suggests logically is that the person rejecting the extension, on clinical trials, ignores some good faith promise on the extensions happening (regardless of any obstacle preventing said extension).

If there were two people speaking, a newly introduced first speaker promises to the person involved in this original prompt that extensions for clinical trials will continue. Then the original speaker (in this question) says, "The proposal to extend clinical trials, which are....", and rejects the first speaker regardless of what they have promised.

Or at least that's how I see how answer choice [E] would play out.......I'd love to be corrected if I am looking at it the wrong way.

Regards,
Xavier

[mwalton444]

If the goal of these clinical trials is to benefit humans (which I think is a reasonable assumption), and the surgical procedure should not be implemented (according to the author), why would you want harmful treatments? That seems to be supporting the authors conclusion as to why these treatments should not be implemented. It sounds like a strengthener not a flaw.
If the treatment is harmful (which I don’t think is the same as “not helpful”) why would you use them on humans. That sounds horrible and unethical.
I don’t think the potential benefits outweigh the potential drawbacks.
Imagine this… Doctor: “Well, darn, I murdered another patient, that’s the 5th this week…Well, gee, at least I now know that this procedure is more harmful than the best treatment available. That information is way more important than the person’s life I just took.”)
This is why I immediately crossed off (A)
BTW, for anybody possibly thinking the same thing I was thinking while going over these last few questions, questions 15(only a little because of (B)),16,17,and 19 all seem to be horrible questions IMO. Maybe the guy who wrote these was out of it or something LOL.