Logical Reasoning

PT118 · S3 · Q19 Editorial: Medical schools spend one

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Editorial: Medical schools spend one hour teaching preventive medicine for every ten hours spent teaching curative medicine, even though doctors’ use of the techniques of preventive medicine cuts down medical costs greatly.

Conclusion

If their goal is to make medicine more cost-effective, medical schools spend insufficient time teaching preventative medicine.

Evidence

Using preventative techniques cuts down medical costs greatly, but the ratio of preventative time to curative time in med school is 1:10.

Evaluate

Whenever we have a conditional conclusion, it is never our responsibility to judge the "If" part (the trigger). We're never trying to strengthen the idea that the trigger is true or will happen. We can never weaken the argument by making it seem like the trigger won't happen. It's just an accepted background condition of the argument.

So suppose that med schools do have the goal of making medicine more cost-effective.

The LINKING assumption the author is making is that,

time spent on preventative is insufficient time 1/10 time spent on curative → spent on preventative

What if we were trying to think of Objections?

How could we argue that, even though only 1/10 as much time is spent on preventative as curative it's still the case that med schools are spending sufficient time on preventative?

Maybe it's way easier to teach preventative than curative? Maybe preventative doesn't vary that much from person to person, so teaching a doctor to do preventative medicine is basically rehearsing the advice of, .

Meanwhile, curative medicine is an insanely complicated endeavor, because there's a whole encyclopedia of conditions a doctor might be trying to cure, and each one has its own treatment protocol.

Goal

Look for the linking assumption of, "if spending 1/10 the time, then insufficient time", or look for some sort of defending assumption like, .

19.

Which one of the following is an assumption on which the editorial's argument depends?

Preventive medicine makes use of
Out of Scope: initial costs
We only know that overall preventative medicine is cheaper. We can't take that claim and then zoom in on any individual part of preventative vs. curative and assume that the preventative part is cheaper. It's possible that the initial cost of a preventative medicine technology is higher (or equal) to that of a curative medicine technology. Since way more people would receive preventative medicine than curative medicine, that equally or more expensive preventative technology might still save money in the long run by being "amortized" on a much bigger base of patients. Some people use the term Premise Booster to describe an answer like this, which essentially tries to give us the backstory on a Premise. This answer has nothing to do with the conclusion, about whether or not med schools are spending sufficient or insufficient time teaching preventative.
10% picked this
Every hour devoted to the
Too Specific: Every Hour Reduces 10%
Does the author need this specific math relationship to be true? Would it matter if some hours devoted to teaching preventative medicine reduce by 9% and other hours reduce by 11%? The 10% in this answer choice matches the idea that the time med school spend on preventative is 10% of what they spend on curative. The author is just saying that they spend 10% as much time on curative, even though curative cuts down medical costs "greatly". Those two claims don't commit the author to believing some weirdly specific idea that each hour of preventative teaching reduces costs by at least 10%. Even if every hour of preventative teaching reduced costs by only 5%, the author's conclusion could still be true --- spending more time on preventative medicine could still help achieve the goal of making medicine more cost-effective.
9% picked this
Medical schools could increase their
Out of Scope: Increasing Total Hours
The author doesn't need to believe that total hours would have to be increased or that medical schools could increase their total hours. The author might believe that med schools should just be shifting more of the hours spent on curative medicine over to preventative medicine. If the students get 110 hours of instruction, and it's currently 10 on preventative and 100 on curative, then the author might just be thinking that med schools should be re-allocating those hours to be more like 40 and 70.
4% picked this
Improvements in doctors’ use of
Too Strong
Too Strong: Would Only Increase Out Of Scope: Improvements In Curative We have no idea how the author feels about improvements in curative medicine. The author's argument is only about how med schools are allocating their hours, in the present tense. She hasn't committed to any beliefs about the future, and it would be extreme for her to believe that any improvement in curative medicine techniques will always increase overall medical costs.
7% picked this
Correct
The time required to teach
Why this is right
In simpler words, this answer is just saying, "The author is assuming that teaching preventive medicine thorougly would take more time than it's currently being given". Does our author believe that? Definitely! Her whole conclusion is that medical schools are spending insufficient time. She clearly thinks that more time should be spent on preventative medicine, which means she thinks that med students are missing out on something with the current number of hours spent on curative medicine. So she thinks that, if you want to teach preventative thoroughly, you need more than 1/10 the hours currently spent on curative. If we negated this answer, would it weaken? Definitely. It would be saying, "The time that's required to teach preventative medicine thoroughly is not any greater than what's currently being spent on it. Thus, we are spending sufficient time teaching preventative medicine."
Skill tested: Necessary Assumption · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
70% picked this

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