Logical Reasoning

PT140 · S3 · Q23 Medical school professor: Most malpractice

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Medical school professor: Most malpractice suits arise out of patients' perceptions that their doctors are acting negligently or carelessly.

Reading Goal

We're primarily reading for Causal, Comparative, Quantified, or Conditional wording, with an overall desire to combine 2 or more claims to derive some idea.

Statements

quantified (most) / causal (arise out of)

Most malpractice suits are caused by patients' thinking that the doctor acted carelessly or negligently.

quantified (many) / causal (as a result)

Many docs think of medicine as science, not art. This mentality makes one less compassionate.

quantified (sometimes)

Busy/stressed (harried) doctors sometimes treat patients rudely or dismissively.

conditional (if)

Docs learned to → avoid lawsuits listen better

causal (encourage)

Economic incentives create reasons for doctors to treat patients rudely.

Evaluate

There are sort of too many disconnected blips here. We have a "most, many, and sometimes", from which you can't make any Trait Overlap quantity inference.

We have causal claims, but do any of them chain together?

Kind of.

Economic incentives lead to doctors treat patients rudely (at least sometimes). Most malpractice suits start because the patient feels like the doctor is being negligent or careless.

That's not quite the same as being rude, though, so I don't think we can say anything as strong as, Econ Incentives → Rude → Malpract lawsuits

We're told that if doctors learned to listen better to patients, there would fewer malpractice lawsuits.

Does that mean, by No Cause, No Effect causal difference-maker logic, that when doctors aren't listening well to patients, the patients do perceive the doctor is being negligent/careless, and thus malpractice lawsuits arise?

It's not a crazy idea, but it's not that well supported. We know MOST malpractice suits come from perception of negligence/carelessness, and we know that if docs listened better, SOME lawsuits could be avoided, but we don't actually know that the lawsuits we would be avoiding are coming from that group of lawsuits caused by perception of negligence/carelessness.

Goal

So, this is a case where we don't push too hard to diagram; we take that overwhelming feeling of, and decide - let's read the paragraph one more time, thoughtfully, for conversational understanding of what's going on - we'll look back at the details as needed as we survey the answers

Since the correct answer is the most provable claim there, we are on guard against language that's Too Strong/Specific, Unknown Comparisons, or Out of Scope ideas.

23.

The medical school professor's statements, if true, most strongly support which one of the following?

  1. Economic incentives to treat patients

    Too Strong: main

    This tries to tie a connective bow around the whole paragraph. Be wary of this type of trap answer. Sometimes the correct answer does connect everything, but they're also testing us on whether we're prudent enough not to overreach. It's also no coincidence that this answer is positioned at (A). Economic incentives give doctors reason to treat patients rudely. The main cause of doctors being sued for malpractice is the patient perception that the doctor was negligent or careless. Is that the same thing as rude? No. So there's no way to draw a straight, strong line from economic incentives to doctors' being sued.

    14% picked this

  2. The economic incentives in the

    Unsupported Relationship

    This is doing a little Word Salad with some of the causal factors. Regarding medicine ⇢ less compassionate as sci, not art economic incentives ⇢ behave rudely We can't draw a causal relationship between economic incentives and regarding medicine as sci, not art.

    30% picked this

  3. Malpractice suits brought against doctors

    Out of Scope: unjustified

    The author isn't offering any opinions or other ways we could derive the idea of "unjustified". If anything, the author is presenting evidence that doctors are acting kinda jerky around patients.

    2% picked this

  4. The scientific outlook in medicine

    Too Strong: should / entirely different

    The author didn't state any opinions, so we'd be making a huge leap to there "should be an entirely different approach to medicine". We know the effect of the scientific outlook is "less compassionate", but maybe we have to balance that against the upsides of the scientific outlook, before we jump to saying "we should replace scientific outlook by something entirely different".

    3% picked this

  5. Correct

    Doctors foster, by their actions,

    Why this is right

    We heard that doctors are often acting less compassionately with their patients, that they sometimes treat their patients rudely or discourage questions or sound patronizing, and that lawsuits could be avoided if doctors learned to listen better. Since we knew that most lawsuits arise from patients perceiving that their doctor is acting carelessly, it seems clear that many patients are perceiving that their doctors do not really care about their patients. There's no straight line way to derive this answer, but it is a reasonable takeaway from the paragraph. The troubling part to me is how to interpret the quantifier of "doctors". ALL doctors foster the perception that they don't really care? We can't support that. This answer is supportable if just meant "some doctors", but the answer uses a categorical "doctors", which typically implies we're speaking of all doctors. This is just one of those correct answers when you need to remind yourself that we're playing a game of "Best Available" answer, and so we can only keep rejecting this answer if we can argue that there's a better answer available.

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

    51% picked this

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