Argument57 =美丽G程小组= by petric

petricUID: 2719885

57The following appeared in a newsletter on nutrition and health.
"Although the multimineral Zorba pill was designed as a simple dietary supplement, a study of first-time ulcer patients who took Zorba suggests that Zorba actually helps prevent ulcers. The study showed that only 25 percent of those ulcer patients who took Zorba under a doctor's direction developed new ulcers, compared to a 75 percent recurrence rate among ulcer patients who did not take Zorba. Clearly, then, Zorba will be highly effective in preventing recurrent ulcers and if health experts inform the general public of this fact, many first-time ulcers can be prevented as well."

1.
不具代表性
他因其他药物作用，个人体质dietary supplement
2.
对复发管用不代表对第一次管用
3.
副作用
Grounding on the study that less ulcers recurrence rate occurs after taking Zorba pill, the author accordingly suggests that Zorba is also effective in preventing first-time ulcers. However, this argument is in fact logically flawed in the following aspects.

One problem with the argument involves the statistical reliability of the survey. We are not informed whether the sample is statistically significant or whether the patients in study were representative of the overall in varied conditions of ulcers. For example, if patients in the sample had optimal human functioning or they were vegetarian activists, Zorba might not have a similar effect to the patients with high consumption of meat. Besides, the smaller the sample is, the less reliable conclusions generalized from the study are. Lacking information about randomness and size of the sample, the author cannot justifiably draw any conclusion whatsoever.

Even if the ulcer patients are capable of representing general ones, the low percentage of recurrence rate is not necessarily due to effect of Zorba. It is entirely possible that the reduced ulcers had nothing to do with Zorba, or this dietary supplement had only an indirect and negligible impact on ulcers, whereas other factors had strong effect during the cure, such as the dosage of other medicines, the diet habits, the direction of the doctor and so forth. Without ruling out other alternatives that might have predominate role in the effects of cure, I cannot accept the author's implicit claim that Zorba is highly effective in preventing recurrent ulcers.

Assuming that Zorba had apparent impacts on decreasing the recurrent ulcers, the author overlooks the possibility that it might not ensure a similar success in first-time ulcers. In common sense , human functioning has immunity towards recurrence of problems after curing them. For that matter, perhaps the effect might be just the opposite in using Zorba for first-time ulcers prevention. Besides, whether Zorba will take some negative side impact is unknown. If so, the author's conclusion amounts to poor one.

In sum, this argument relies on certain problematic assumptions which render it unconvincing as it stands. In order to draw a better conclusion, the author should reason more convincing, cite some evidence about whether other factors contribute to decrease ulcers, weighing the benefits of alternative explanations and take every possible consideration into account.

scdxwhUID: 2639990

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