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argument51
The following appeared in a medical newsletter.
"Doctors have long suspected that secondary infections may keep some patients from healing quickly after severe muscle strain. this hypothesis has now been proved by preliminary results of a study of two groups of patients. The first group of patients, all being treated for muscle injuries by Dr.Newland, a doctor who specializes in the sports medicine, took antibiotics regularly throughout their treatment. There recuperation time was, on average, 40 percent quicker than typically expected. Patients in the second group, all being treated by Dr.Alton, a general physician, were given sugar pills, although the patients believed they were taking antibiotics. Their average recuperation time was not significantly reduced. Therefore, all patients who are diagnosed with muscle strain would be well advised to take antibiotics as part of their treatment."
On the first viewing that the argument was well-presented, the writer make a hypothesis that patients have severe muscle strain may heal quickly after the secondary infections in terms of the experiment on the two groups that take different pills. But when you look through it, you will easily find that the conclusion from the experiment is that reasonable in many aspects.
The most apparent flaw is that the experiment relies on too many assumptions. Firstly, the writer unfairly assume that the two group of patients have the same kind of disease, and if the assumption is true, it also have a doubt that the disease the patient have is on the same level, it is totally possible that in the second group the patients' disease are more severe than the first group. Moreover, the two groups were treated by two different doctors, and the two doctors are in different field of medicine, so the results of the experiment is quite possible to be influenced by the skills of the two doctors, and also the patients in the two groups may have different attitude towards the doctors, the patients in the first group may have more confidence of Dr.Newland, since this kind of feeling is good for them to heal. Still, there exist another problem that the sugar pills may have a bad effect on the patients while the experiment didn't set an experiment such as that one group has the sugar pills and the other has nothing to prove that the sugar pills is harmless. So without a more accurate experiment to prove all these assumptions is true that the writers’ conclusion is not reasonable.
Assume that all the assumptions above have been approved to be true, there still exist another problem that the 40 percent quicker than typically expected is not a convictive number to let us believe that the antibiotic is effective, and the time that expected provide nothing for the experiment, since the time expected is determined by people and it may differ from different doctors, so this number can be seen as useless.
The last one, we can not advise all the patient who have the muscle strain to take this antibiotic medicine, since this medicine should be test for a little long period that didn't have bad-effects and also this antibiotic will suitable for all the patients in different areas or countries. So merely the experiment isn't reasonable enough to advise all the patients that have the muscle strain to have this antibiotic.
Overall, the results and the experiment seem convictive to prove that the antibiotics are effective for healing the muscle strain. However, before the final decisions are made we need more experiments, such as the experiment to approve the sugar pills didn't have bad effect on the patients, and more should be tested by the time for the use of this antibiotic, and different areas should be treated differently.
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