Q20 - Medical reporter: Studies have consistently

[hyewonkim89]

I was struggling between (A) and (B) and ended up picking (A)..

I see now that the stimulus doesn't really argue that taking an aspirin a day can prevent a heart disease.

But I'm still not so confident about (B). Even if most people are not in danger, wouldn't they still benefit from an aspirin a day? Is (B) the right answer because the stimulus says most people would be in "better" shape and it's possible that an aspirin a day really won't affect them?

Any help would be appreciated!

[christine.defenbaugh]

Good question, hyewonkim89, and I think you're starting to circle in on why (B) is correct here.

Let's take it from the top. Since this is a Flaw question, we'll start with the core.

1) aspirin/day helps prevent/reduce
severity of heart disease=================> aspirin/day would give
2) heart disease = one of the most=========> most people better health
common ailments

The word 'most' is a weird quantifier to pop up suddenly in the conclusion. Can we support that with the premises? The aspirin regimen would help prevent heart disease, or at least reduce the severity of it, so that seems awesome for people who will or might get it. And we know that heart disease is one of the most common bad things.

But imagine that we had 100 people, and there were a few ailments that affected just 4-5 people each. Heart disease, however, affected 10 people. Heart disease would be one of the most common ailments (in fact, it would be the most common ailment), but it would NOT be affecting most of the people! Now further imagine that those 90 people who don't have it, have less chance of getting heart disease than of getting struck by lightning and a meteor at the same time.

What happens if those 90 people take an aspirin a day? Maybe it reduces their chance of getting heart disease down to the chances of getting struck by lightning, hit by a meteor, and winning the lottery simultaneously. Are they now in 'better health'? I'd say not.

Answer (B) targets this directly. If most people aren't in any significant danger, then whatever increased prevention aspirin can give doesn't actually put them in 'better health'.



Not the Problem
(A) The ideas that aspirin reduces heart disease severity and helps prevent it are both premises. There's no conditional relationship assumed between them, because the author does not use one as evidence for the other. They are both just given facts.

(C) The other most common diseases are not relevant to this argument. We only care about heart disease.

(D) We don't need aspirin to be the "single most effective" approach for it to produce "better health"; it just needs to be effective.

(E) Both the premise and the conclusion are limited to "industrialized nations", so we don't need the studies to have been done anywhere else.



"Most" is a great quantity word that should trigger us to investigate a bit to make sure it's fully supportable, and if not, find out why not!

Please let me know if this completely answered your question!

[agutman]

Here's my take on it!

PT69, S1, Q20 (Flaw)

The trigger "˜therefore’ makes it easy to identify the conclusion here: "most people in industrialized nations would be in better health if they took an aspirin a day". This is based on two premises: "an aspirin a day thins the blood, thereby helping to prevent or reduce the severity of heart disease" and "heart disease is one of the most common types of ill health in industrialized nations". We can now diagram the core:

One aspirin per day --> thinner blood --> reduced severity of hearth disease
+
heart disease is one of the most common types of ill health in industrialized nations
--> one aspirin per day will improve health of most people in industrialized nations

Seems like a pretty solid argument, right? By reducing the severity of a common type of ill health, one would be in better health. How did we reduce the severity? We took an aspirin every day. If you try your best to come up with a counter argument (it’s worth taking 20-30 seconds for this) you might ask: what if the aspirin, while reducing the severity of heart disease, also causes some other horrible disease that would lead to poor health? In other words, we need a guarantee that one aspirin per day won’t do more harm than good. If we quickly scan the answer choices searching for our prediction, we won’t find it! This is a great example of the importance of being flexible. Let’s analyze the answer choices one by one:

(A) No it doesn’t; the premise clearly stated "helping to prevent or reduce the severity of heart disease".

(C) This may be true but it doesn’t hurt the conclusion; preventing or reducing heart disease on its own is good enough for the conclusion to hold.

(D) This may be true but it doesn’t hurt the conclusion; aspirin could even be the 50th most effective, and the conclusion would still hold.

(E) This may be true but it doesn’t hurt the conclusion; the argument’s scope is limited to industrialized nations.

(B) This is the only answer choice concerned with "most people", and it may remind us that the conclusion also mentioned "most people". Hang on, we learned that the word "˜most’ is important on the LSAT. Is it in fact reasonable to conclude that aspirin would improve the health of most people? Perhaps, if most people suffer from heart disease. But we don’t know that, making this answer the correct answer.

[icebreaker]

Hello, great explanations above but would anyone be able to elaborate on answer choice (C) for me please?

When I read this argument, I immediately pre-phrased the answer to attack the change in scope. (From reducing heart disease to better health..... the answer should probably say something like reducing heart disease/preventing it/ taking aspirin does NOT help with other highly common illnesses, or second-hand smoke, ETC; therefore, we cannot conclude that people will be in better health)

So while I overlooked the "most people" part in the conclusion and answer choice (B), I am having trouble eliminating (C).

(C) says that the author overlooks the possibility that taking aspirin has little/no effect on other diseases.

If the author did consider this possibility, he/she would not conclude the notion about better health. Help pls?

[jpittelluf]

Same question as above. I pre-phrased the exact same way, and would like some further clarification. Thanks!

[fmuirhea]

I see where you're both going with (C), but it doesn't say what I think you want it to say. Just because taking an aspirin doesn't have an effect on other diseases that one may already have doesn't mean it isn't helping one's overall health. I think what you want (C) to say is that taking aspirin will cause new diseases to pop up, negating the benefit gained from reducing the severity of heart disease.

Consider somebody who has a few illnesses:

before taking aspiring: diabetes, psoriasis, (risk of) heart disease
after taking aspirin: diabetes, psoriasis

Here, even though taking aspirin hasn't had any effect on the diabetes or psoriasis, since it has knocked out the heart disease, you can conclude that one is in better overall health. Even if we grant that it doesn't knock out heart disease completely (the argument says prevents or reduces the severity), you can still say that one would be in better health, even if it's just slightly better health due to a slightly reduced risk/severity of heart disease.

I think what you want (C) to do is suggest that taking aspirin would cause some other illness(es) that is/are just as bad as or worse than heart disease, because this would indicate that, on balance, one's overall health has either stayed the same or declined. For example:

before taking aspiring: diabetes, psoriasis, (risk of) heart disease
after taking aspirin: diabetes, psoriasis, pneumonia, lupus**

In this situation, sure, we've eliminated the heart disease, but in doing so, we've caused two more illnesses to spring up. So, (C) would be better if it said something like, "It overlooks the possibility that in taking an aspirin a day to prevent or reduce the severity of heart disease, one would significantly increase one's chances of contracting a serious illness, such as pneumonia or lupus." But, (C) doesn't say that. I hope I've explained the distinction as I see it, but let me know if anything is unclear!

**(Although my medical knowledge is slim, I know it's unlikely that taking aspirin would cause pneumonia or lupus [it's never lupus], but I'm not striving for accuracy - just trying to point out the how new information could affect the argument. So, for the science majors, please don't come at me with pitchforks!)

[tommywallach]

Great explanation, Fmuir!

-t

[cvoldstad]

This is pretty nitpicky but while I got this question right I was really thrown by the language in the question stem!

The stimulus is provided by a MEDICAL REPORTER while the question stem asks us to evaluate the reasoning in the DOCTORS argument.... isn't this an instance of the sort of 'term shift' we are often selecting as a logical fallacy??

[tommywallach]

Interesting indeed. Seems like an error on their part, to be honest. As if it had been a doctor when they first wrote it, then they changed the prompt but forgot to change the stem (or vice-versa). Luckily, because doctors are mentioned absolutely NOWHERE, the question would have no correct answer. So you can infer what they mean.

Definitely a mistake on their part though!

-t

[donghai819]

But imagine that we had 100 people, and there were a few ailments that affected just 4-5 people each. Heart disease, however, affected 10 people. Heart disease would be one of the most common ailments (in fact, it would be the most common ailment), but it would NOT be affecting most of the people! Now further imagine that those 90 people who don't have it, have less chance of getting heart disease than of getting struck by lightning and a meteor at the same time.

What happens if those 90 people take an aspirin a day? Maybe it reduces their chance of getting heart disease down to the chances of getting struck by lightning, hit by a meteor, and winning the lottery simultaneously. Are they now in 'better health'? I'd say not.

To be honest, after reading the stimulus, I had predicted that the flaw would be something like "taking an aspirin a day would cause other bad effects, making the population in worse condition, though it reduces heart disease". It turned out no such an answer choice here.

For me, B is a less plausible correct answer, maybe because I am less capable of recognizing a flaw like the one here. Ultimately, A, C, D, and E are obviously wrong.