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TOPIC: 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 sports medicine, took antibiotics regularly throughout their treatment. Their 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."
WORDS: 461
TIME: 00:30:00
DATE: 2009-8-8 18:01:28

While it is true that the patients who took antibiotics recuperated more quickly than those who falsely imagined than they had took antibiotics, which seems to be an indication that antibiotics contributed to heal the secondary infections and thus made the patients recover more quickly, the arguer actually ignored many key factors that might also play a decisive role in determining the result of the study.

First of all, the arguer provides no information concerning the patients involved in the study. Did they have secondary infections? If not, the use of antibiotics and sugar made no sense in terms of the treatment of secondary infections. Common sense tells us that antibiotics indeed are able to kill bacteria which could make the patients recover quickly from infections, however, if the patients did not suffer from secondary infections, talking about whether antibiotics accelerated the recover of the infected parts of the body made no sense because no bacteria existed in their muscle at all.

Even assuming that the patients involved in the study all suffered from secondary infections, the argument still lend little credible support to the conclusion that it's antibiotics rather than other factors that gave rise to the quicker recuperation of the muscle strain because the characteristic of the patients were not provided. If the group of patients who recuperated faster were healthy and energetic young men, and the other group of the patients are all weak aged and sick men. It's obviously that young men recovered more quickly than the aged ones even if they didn't take antibiotics. Thus, we cannot decide whether antibiotics helped to the quicker recuperation.

Besides, since the two group were treated by different doctors, one is a doctor who specializes in sports medicine, and another one is a general physician, it’s possible that the accelerated time of recuperation originated from the distinctive abilities of the two doctors in treating muscle strain. Common sense tells us that a doctor who specializes in sports medicine is more able to treat those who suffer from muscle strain, because muscle strain originate from injures in sports, exercises, and so forth, which belong to the field of sports medicine. Although a general physician is also able to treat muscle strain, he/she might not be as effective as a doctor who specializes in sports medicine.

Moreover, the arguer didn't provide us with information about the influence of sugar on the patients. What if sugar contributed to the deceleration of the recuperation of the patients? Even if the patients falsely imagined that they were taking antibiotics, common sense tells us that the effects of sugar on the patients would actually not be undermined. If so, the patient might actually recover slower than those who took neither antibiotics not sugar, it’s the sugar than made the recuperation process slower.
In fact, the study would be more persuasive if the second group were give pure water that have nothing to do with any disease.

In conclusion, although the arguer are motivated to find out the reason of the quicker recuperation and then make the secondary infection patients of muscle strain recover more quickly, he may mask the real reason that made the patient recover more quickly. What is more, if the real reason is not found out,, the arguer may in fact mislead people to take antibiotics to treat the secondary infection muscle strain, which would indeed be bad for the some patients’ health because of their side-effects.