Examkin

Question

Difficulty: MediumWeaken

Health Policy Analyst: A five-year hospital study observed that patients assigned to rooms with large windows overlooking landscaped gardens requested 25 percent less pain medication following surgery than patients whose rooms overlooked brick walls. Therefore, exposure to natural scenery directly accelerates physiological recovery from surgical trauma, reducing the biological need for analgesic drugs.

Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the health policy analyst's argument?

  1. A
    Patients in garden-view rooms exhibited measurably lower physiological markers of psychological stress, which are known to promote faster tissue repair.
  2. B
    Patients placed in rooms overlooking brick walls did not experience a higher rate of overall post-surgical medical complications than other patients.
  3. Hospital staff routinely assign patients recovering from minor, less invasive procedures to garden-view rooms while reserving brick-wall rooms for patients recovering from major surgeries.Answer
  4. D
    All surgical patients require substantial quantities of analgesic medications regardless of their physical hospital environment.
  5. E
    The hospital spent substantially more money maintaining its landscaped gardens than it saved from the reduction in pain medication purchases.

Answer

The argument is most weakened by establishing that hospital staff routinely assign patients recovering from minor procedures to garden-view rooms and patients recovering from major surgeries to brick-wall rooms.
The correct answer demonstrates that the two patient cohorts were fundamentally dissimilar prior to room assignment. If patients undergoing less invasive procedures were placed in garden-view rooms, the 25 percent lower pain medication usage is directly explained by the less painful nature of their operations rather than any therapeutic effect of the scenery. This alternative explanation severs the causal link between the scenery and recovery rate.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the argument's premises and main conclusion
Premise: Patients in garden-view rooms requested 25% less pain medication post-surgery than those in brick-wall rooms. Conclusion: Exposure to natural scenery directly accelerates physiological recovery, thereby reducing biological pain medication need.
Deconstructing the argument isolates the author's logical leap from a correlation to a direct causal claim.
2
Identify the unstated assumption and logical vulnerability
The author assumes that the two patient groups were comparable in all relevant surgical aspects and that the visual scenery itself caused the disparity in medication requests.
Causal conclusions on the LSAT are vulnerable to alternate explanations, non-random group assignments, and confounding variables.
3
Evaluate the choices to find the statement that provides an alternative explanation for the disparity
Showing that patients with less severe surgeries were systematically placed in garden-view rooms accounts for the lower pain medication demand without attributing any curative power to the scenery.
Introducing an inherent difference in initial surgical severity between the groups breaks the proposed causal connection.

Key Concept

Alternative Explanations in Causal Reasoning
Estimated Time:1m 15s
Rate this question

Topics

Weaken

More questions from this topic