Logical Reasoning

PT113 · S3 · Q3 Announcement for a television program

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Announcement for a television program: Are female physicians more sensitive than male physicians to the needs of women patients?

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To assess whether female physicians are more sensitive than male physicians to the needs of female patients, we'll ask male and female physicians.

Flaw

The people who are best equipped to judge are the patients!

Meanwhile, this TV show is saying they're going to ask the doctors themselves to self-evaluate how sensitive they were to the patient's needs.

This would be like saying,

Shouldn't we ask Sammy? Isn't he the arbiter of who make the better Mac & Cheese?

Goal

Look for an answer saying that it's silly to be asking the physicians who was more sensitive to the patient's needs, when only the patient knows what their needs are and only the patient can tell us which doctor was more sensitive to their needs.

3.

Which one of the following, if true, identifies a flaw in the plan for the program?

  1. Physicians are in general unwilling

    Not Our Main Objection

    It is true that in this show, a male physician may be asked to describe the treatment style of other male physicians vs. female physicians (as treatment style pertains to sensitivity to needs). But whichever physicians have agreed to be on this TV show probably know that they are going to be talking about male vs. female physicians, so even if most physicians are unwilling, the physicians we have slotted for this show are presumably among the population of physicians that are willing to discuss.

    2% picked this

  2. There still are fewer women

    Not an Objection

    The topic being addressed has nothing to do with whether there are more / fewer physician of either sex. It's only about assessing who's better / worse at being sensitive to female patients' needs. We're only judging the show's methodology based on whether or not we think they will be capable of giving a good answer to that question. This answer seems worried about what people will do with that answer once they've heard it and need to schedule their next doctor's appointment.

    3% picked this

  3. Correct

    Those who are best able

    Why this is right

    Which would we trust more: 1. the data we get from female patients who have to rate their male/female physician in terms of how well the physician addressed their needs? or 2. the data we get from physicians appraising their own abilities to meet the needs of the patients? If we're having a contest to see who can bake the best cupcake, do we care more about hearing the ratings of the judges who tried the cupcake (the patients) or more about hearing the self-ratings of the chefs who baked the cupcakes (the physicians)? The metric in question, "how well were the patient's needs met", is something that the patient should be telling us, not the physician.

    Skill tested: Flaw · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    93% picked this

  4. Since medical research is often

    Irrelevant Distinction

    No part of this TV show is dealing with medical research, so this fact has nothing to do with our objection. We're not worried about whether all research results are fully applicable to women. We're worried about whether female patients feels like their physician is more sensitive to their needs when it's a male vs. a female physician.

    1% picked this

  5. Women as patients are now

    Irrelevant Distinction

    This doesn't sound like any sort of objection to the plan for tomorrow's TV show.

    0% picked this

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