Q23 - Medical School Professor: Most malpractice suits arise

[ttunden]

Hello

Can anyone explain why the answer is E? I incorrectly picked B during the test. At this moment the 5 minute warning was announced and I had some earlier questions to check up on so I got this question wrong.

I am able to eliminate A C and D since they are unsupported and/or too extreme(D). I was between B and E and went with B since it looked like something you could infer.

I guess I can understand why B is wrong now. I think that economic incentives in "health care system" is specific and not alluded to in the argument. Also, from the stimulus we know that when doctors treat medicine as science it results in less compassion. We don't know if it results in "treating patients rudely" as stated in the last sentence( result of the economic incentives).

Still stuck on E however.

[.]

I'm going to give this a shot. This was kind of a tough question for me, so I hope my response is good.

The last sentence pretty much says:

Doctors listened better ---> Lawsuits will be avoided

However, we know from the first sentence that lawsuits are not being avoided, doctors are getting sued, mostly because of what patients think of them.

So we know:

~Lawsuits being avoided ---> ~Doctors listened better

So doctors are not listening. To me, that is the "action" that answer choice E is talking about.

And we also know that most of these lawsuits arise from patients perceptions that doctors are acting negligently or CARELESSLY.

So since lawsuits are still happening, that that most of those patients think that the doctors are careless, or don't really care about them, and that all those doctors did not listen to the patients better.

Thus, for at least some doctors, their actions very likely fostered the perception that they do not really care about their patients.

Let me know if that makes any sense... it might not, but that's the only way I could come up with to justify it. I think the best way to get this answer is POE, this justification is something I whipped up after the test while reviewing.

[ohthatpatrick]

Great discussion!

This is the essence of what is frustrating and challenging about modern LSATs and questions late in LR sections.

You get some correct answers that aren't super supportable in the traditional sense of older LSATs, but they win by being "most supportable" over answers that have no support.

I think the previous poster summed up our support for (E) very well.

We know from the first sentence that the perception exists that doctors do not really care about their patients (at least some patients, those that sue, feel that way).

Well where does this impression come from? Actions? Words? Fabrications?

The rest of the information suggests actions that contribute:
- treating patients rudely
- discouraging them from asking questions
- patronizing them
- not listening as well as they'd need to in order to avoid lawsuits

The annoying thing about (E) to me is the ambiguity of how broadly or universally we're allowed to interpret this claim.

Doctors foster the perception .... "all doctors" ... among "all patients"?

Or are we just saying "this sometimes happens"?

If I saw
"Soccer games attract large TV audiences". Does that mean always? Sometimes?

Most of the time we'd interpret that as a generalization about all soccer games, but you can certainly picture someone saying that sentence without meaning ALWAYS.

The bottom line is that even if (E) is an overstatement, we have SOME support for it.

(A) the "main" cause is the crux of this claim, and it's contradicted by the fact that we know that "patients' perceptions that doctors are acting negligently or carelessly" is the main cause of malpractice suits. Can we equate "economic incentives to treat rudely" with "patients' perceptions that ...". I don't think so.

(B) We have no support for this causal connection. We know that economic incentives (not necessarily from the health care system, as the original poster awesomely observed) lead to rude treatment. But where would we justify that economic incentives lead to thinking of medicine as science vs. art?

(C) "for the most part unjustified" stamps a big strong opinion on the passage that we can't support. The fact that the final sentence is prefaced by "unfortunately" means that the author HAS a negative feeling towards the current behavior of doctors.

(D) SHOULD be replaced by an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT is way too extreme to support.

Which leaves us with the stinker, (E), as the most supportable answer.

Tough stuff!

[pewals13]

If most malpractice suits arise from a perception wouldn't they be unjustified? It seems like that would be within the common-sense standard of the LSAT. I guess I need to stick closer to the precise wording of the stimulus.

[ohthatpatrick]

Yeah I don't think we can make a leap from
"Patients perceive that their doctors are acting negligently or carelessly" to
"their doctors are NOT acting negligently or carelessly".

That's a big difference.

I see how you got there, though. In real life, we often use "perceive" to stress that it was someone's opinion, not reality.

Shelly had the perception that I was gone from work because I was sick .... (but I was really golfing).

But the statement itself that "Shelly had the perception that I was gone from work because I was sick" does not inherently lean towards "she was wrong".

In normal life, we say "not ALL my friends are Democrats" and typically are implying that "most of my friends are Democrats, but I have at least a few token conservative friends".

But on LSAT, "not all my friends are Democrats" simply means "I have at least one conservative friend". With only the "not all" statement, I still have ZERO proof that ANY of my friends ARE Democrats.

(Remember, "not all NFL players are female" is a true statement ... it doesn't logically imply that some NFL players ARE female).

So I think this is a case of real life vs. LSAT.

Perceptions can be correct, so we can't assume that most perceptions are MISconceptions.

Good question, though.

[LukeM22]

Great discussion!


(A) the "main" cause is the crux of this claim, and it's contradicted by the fact that we know that "patients' perceptions that doctors are acting negligently or carelessly" is the main cause of malpractice suits. Can we equate "economic incentives to treat rudely" with "patients' perceptions that ...". I don't think so.

They obviously aren't equivalent, but the paragraph does make it seem that one is leading to the other.

Economic Incentives--> Rude Treatment--> Negligent Perceptions--> (Most) Lawsuits

Unless "main cause" only refers to something that isn't a chain sequence?

[LukeM22]

Just wanted to bump this:

If, based on the knowledge that we have, A causes B, which is the main cause of C... does A not "cause" C? Must it only be one step removed?

[ohthatpatrick]

Yeah, "Main cause" seems like it would not only have to be more common or influential than any other potential cause, but it would also have to be a direct cause.

LSAT calls stuff like 'economic incentives' in this example an indirect cause.

(A) could have been correct if it said
"economic incentives to treat patients rudely are an indirect cause of some doctors' being sued for malpractice"

It's a tempting answer because we know Inference wants us to tie stuff together, and this one seems to be wrapping up everything, but we also know on Inference we need to be really wary of strong wording.

In this case, my fear of "main cause" trumps my desire to connect the whole conversation into one synthesis.

[obobob]

Hi,

can anyone explain what's the significance of the fourth sentence, if it has any? :
"Lawsuits could be avoided if doctors learned to listen better to patients."

I took this sentence as: if doctors learned to listen better to patients --> then lawsuits could be avoided.

From there, I was connecting this with the following sentence and thought:

certain economic incentives encourage doctors to treat patients rudely --> so such incentives are unlikely helping doctors to listen better to patients. (So, the incentives don't help in doctors avoiding lawsuits).


From here, I kind of felt iffy about answer choice (A) even though I ended up choosing (E).
I know all the explanations above point to the first sentence of the professor in explaining (A), I was also wondering if the fourth sentence is not relevant in considering this answer choice, and if so, for what reason.


Thank you!

[ohthatpatrick]

I'm getting confused by what you're asking at the end there. It sounded like you thought (A) was the correct answer, because you were asking about people explaining it using lines of text.

Or did you mean people were explaining what lines of text allowed them to get rid of (A)? We've been saying that "main cause" is the reason to get rid of (A). There aren't any lines that explain that, per se. The idea of a wrong answer is that it contains some wording or idea that ISN'T supported by the facts. (A) contains the idea that economic incentives are the MAIN cause of malpractice suits.

The first sentence identifies that most malpractice suits are caused by patients' perceptions that their docs don't care. Since that's the cause of a majority of malpractice suits, we mght say that "the perception that docs don't care" is the main cause of malpractice. But we don't have support for the idea that economic incentives are the #1 cause.

The 4th sentence is indeed conditional and you represented it correctly:
if listened better --> avoid lawsuits

It seemed like you were trying to make a chain like:
econ incentives -> not listen better -> still have lawsuits

That's not allowed on a must be true (because that was an illegal negation of "if listened better -> avoid lawsuits"), but it's supportable on a "most strongly supported".

I had the same premonition, that they would reward us for putting together the causal chain of "econ incentives lead to rude doctors, which lead to malpractice suits".

An answer that safely expressed that "economic incentives may be influencing the number of malpractice suits" would have been a correct answer.

But since (A) intolerably says "economic incentives are the MAIN cause", we have to reject it.

Hope this helps.