PrepTest 135, Section 1, Question 15
Researcher: Every year approximately the same number of(42 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the researcher's(10 more words not shown)
- Aprevention of noniatrogenic(11 more words not shown)
- Bsome medical treatments(9 more words not shown)
- Cpeople who do(11 more words not shown)
- Dthere is no(11 more words not shown)
- Ewhenever a noniatrogenic(9 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Preventing a treatment from killing someone doesn't guarantee that the person survives the year.
Some patients may already be seriously ill. Imagine someone being treated for advanced cancer. A harmful effect of the treatment might cause that person's death, just as the premise describes. Remove that harmful effect, and the cancer could still kill the patient soon afterward. The cause of death would change without reducing that year's total number of deaths.
That's the problem with simply cutting the total in half. We're told that treatment-related deaths equal deaths from all other causes combined. The researcher assumes that eliminating the first category would leave the second category unchanged. But some people saved from the first cause could join the second group.
What we’re looking for
The flaw question should point to that possibility. We don't have to dispute the reported numbers or show that preventing all treatment-related deaths is impossible. Even if the prevention succeeded, would the predicted reduction follow?
Working the answers
- A
This considers what preventing other diseases would do to treatment-related disease. The argument goes in the other direction: suppose we prevent treatment-related disease, then ask what happens to the annual death total. A doesn't identify why that proposed reduction might fail.
- B
Less damaging treatments might help prevent treatment-related deaths. But the researcher has already asked us to suppose prevention is possible. Describing a possible way to improve treatment doesn't tell us whether the people saved would still die that year from another cause.
- CCorrect
Someone spared one cause of death may soon die of another. That means eliminating treatment-related deaths needn't remove all those people from the annual death count. The timing matters: eventual death many years later wouldn't defeat the prediction about this year's reduction, but death soon afterward could.
- D
The researcher doesn't require one universal prevention method. Multiple methods could do the job. More fundamentally, the conclusion is conditional: if all these diseases could be prevented, annual deaths would fall by half. A difficulty in achieving the condition doesn't explain why the claimed result fails even when we grant it.
- E
A risk of treatment-related disease whenever another disease occurs doesn't establish what the annual death total would be after prevention. We can grant the researcher's hypothetical prevention and still ask whether the underlying illnesses would kill some patients. That is the overlooked possibility in C, not the general existence of risk described here.
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