Logical Reasoning

PT126 · S4 · Q5 Medical specialists report that patients

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Medical specialists report that patients with back muscle injuries who receive a combination of drugs and physical therapy do only as well as those who receive physical therapy alone.

Background

Patients with back injuries who receive a combo of drugs and physical therapy do only as well as those who just receive physical therapy.

Surprising Claim

Medical specialists say that the drugs are a necessary part of the treatment for all patients who receive them for back injuries.

Evaluate

Given That ... the people who get (physical therapy + drugs) do only as well as the people go get (physical therapy + no drugs)

How Can We Say That .... the drugs are a necessary part of the treatment for the people who got it?

It looks like the drugs are doing nothing, since people who only had physical therapy are doing just as well, but our correct answer will give us some way to say that the people who got [physical therapy + drugs] wouldn't have done as well if they had only gotten physical therapy (or maybe it will say that the people who didn't get drugs would have done worse if they had been given drugs).

Goal

Even though we don't usually try to predict answers for Paradox, those of us who know the Anti-Causal arguments we see in the Assumption family may recognize a pattern here.

If I say, , how could we object to that argument?

We can say, .

In other words, when two groups are measured as being the same, if we want to argue that some special property one of them had was meaningful, we have to say that .

Which one of the following, if true, most helps to reconcile the medical specialists' two claims?

Medical specialists treat all patients
No Impact
This doesn't offer any distinction between the two groups (the ones who do / don't receive drugs), so it doesn't provide us way to say that the drug-group really needed those drugs and would have been worse without them.
3% picked this
Correct
Medical specialists who prescribe these
Why this is right
This correct answer is pretty miserable. It's one of those ones where if you weren't already thinking what LSAT wanted you to be thinking, then you wouldn't see anything in this answer to provoke that thinking in you. This is getting at the idea that medical specialists only give physical therapy to patients who can recover with physical therapy alone, whereas they give physical therapy and drugs to patients who would need both in order to recover. So the drugs are a necessary part of the treatment for those who receive it, because the medical specialist accurately judged that those people needed drugs. And drugs were not necessary to those who didn't receive them. If you wanted to, you could put this into conditional form: received drugs ? needed drugs didn't receive drugs ? didn't need drugs Even though the patients w/o drugs recovered as much as the patients w/ drugs, the drugs were still necessary for those who got them, because the medical specialist made an accurate judgment in assessing whether that patient needed drugs. If it sounds a little circular, it almost is, but it's really just getting at the simpler real-world idea that a specialist will prescribe physical therapy for milder cases of back injuries and physical therapy + drugs for more severe cases. If she succeeds in getting all her patients to recover, it might look like drugs did nothing, but it could otherwise be that drugs did do something, and she was wise/accurate enough to only give it to the people who actually needed the drugs.
Skill tested: Paradox · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
63% picked this
Some back muscle injuries have
Weak / No Impact
Some = at least one, so any answer with "some / sometimes" will almost always be wrong on questions like Paradox, Strengthen, and Weaken (where we want more powerful answers). It's great that some back muscle injury patients completely healed with drugs and physical therapy. According to our background fact, that means that people who got physical therapy alone also completely healed. This doesn't do anything to justify the idea that the drugs were a necessary part of that complete recovery, because it doesn't provide any difference between the people who got drugs and those who didn't.
4% picked this
Some back muscle injuries that
Weak / No Impact
Some = at least one, so any answer with "some / sometimes" will almost always be wrong on questions like Paradox, Strengthen, and Weaken (where we want more powerful answers). This answer is weak and is dealing with a really strange atypical case in which amateur attempts at physical therapy messed up the patient's condition and then drugs successfully treated that condition. The fact that drugs helped these specific people who initially had their injuries made worse by improper physical therapy doesn't help us to explain this big, generalized data set in the first sentence: ALL the back injury patients who received physical therapy + drugs did only as well as those who got only physical therapy. The "some" people in this answer that were successfully treated with drugs still did only as well as some other people who were only treated with physical therapy. So why were drugs necessary? Maybe proper attempts at physical therapy would have been just as effective?
23% picked this
Patients with injuries to other
Deepens Paradox
The reference to "other injuries" is out of scope to begin with, but then this answer continues to get worse, as it makes it sound like physical therapy + drugs is better than physical therapy alone. Okay, well then I'm even more confused why in the case of back muscle injuries, physical therapy + drugs only did as well as PT alone.
7% picked this

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