LSAT 130 | Section 1 | Logical Reasoning: Q5

LR Question 5 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Doctor: While a few alternative medicines have dangerous

QUESTION TYPE: Weaken

CONCLUSION: People should be able to provide herbs for serious illnesses.

REASONING: Some herbs have been proven not to cause damage. (They haven’t been proven to have a benefit.)

ANALYSIS: This question only focusses on one side of things: do the herbs cause direct damage.

Indirect damage is ignored. If people take a herb, they probably won’t take the medically proven remedy. So you might end up with situations where people take a herb instead of, say, an antibiotic.

In Canada recently (2017) there have been some high profile cases where patients died because they took an alternate remedy instead of the official one. It wasn’t the herb that killed them – it was the disease, which could have been stopped by medicine. So this is a serious issue.

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1. CORRECT. If this is true, then allowing herbal remedies may cause real harm. If patients neglect working cures, they may be harmed or even die.
2. This may seem unfortunate, but it doesn’t actually show the herbal remedies cause harm.
3. This is too vague to be useful. It could mean that a herbal remedy is safe for a million people but causes a rash in one other.
   Also note that this statement applies equally to conventional drugs.
4. So? Profit motive isn’t a bad thing if it doesn’t cause harm.
5. So? This just shows there’s no benefit. But the conclusion was, basically “hey, why not allow it, at least it doesn’t harm anybody.”