Argument167

倒着走的小妖UID：2377654

The arguer cites a research with 30participants who suffer from insomnia. In the research, the volunteers slepteach night for three weeks on lavender-scented pillows in a controlled roomwhere their sleep was monitored. And the research studies the sleep in threedifferent weeks; then claims that lavender is effective in curing insomnia.However, the research is flawed in several respects asit stands and therefore rendersany conclusion resting on it unpersuasive.

To begin with, the arguer fails to indicatewhether the volunteers felt tired in the third week, so it is impossible for usto compare the sleeping quality in the third week with the previous two weeks.Moreover, common sense informs me that people with insomnia often find it hard tofall asleep. At this point, how soundly or long aperson sleeps, or how tired a person feels after sleep, is somewhat irrelevantto whether the person suffers from insomnia. Yet the arguer provides noinformation about the change of time these volunteers need to fall asleep over these three weeks. Therefore, we cannotconfidently conclude that the insomnia is cured over three weeks.

Second, even if the sleep had improvedduring the three weeks, the arguer assumes further that it is lavender-scentedpillows that made the volunteers slept longer and more soundlywithout sleeping medication in the third week. But it is entirely possible thatsince these volunteers did not have enough sleep in the previous week, theywere just so tired that this week they weremaking up the missing sleep . Or perhaps they got used to the room after two weeks and thenit was  easier for them tosleep well in a familiar environment. Without ruling out theseand other alternative explanations, the arguer can not convince me thatlavender-scented pillows contributed to the better sleep in the thirdweek.

Last but not least, there are two mainproblems with the methodology of the research. First, the research may be notobjective since the experiment depended on the participants to report theirfeelings but not some other more objective and accurate means to record theresults. Then there is a big chance that these volunteers may exaggerate or even lie about the sleep pattern hoping to get a good result for the research. Or perhaps it is the subconscious that the folk remedy is effective that cured the insomnia but not the lavender-scentedpillows. Second, the volunteers also took their usual sleeping medicationduring the research; thereby we cannot recognize which oneremedies the insomnia. In short, because the research is problematic in itself,we cannot rely on it to draw any firm conclusion.

In conclusion, the argument is unconvincingbecause the research it based on lends little credit support toit. To bolster it, the arguer must provide a controlexperiment as a standard ofcomparison in judging experimental effects to make the results more objective and compelling.To better assess it, I would need to know the variation of these volunteers' inability to fall asleep.