LR Question 15 Explanation, by LSATHacks
QUESTION TEXT: Ordinary mountain sickness, a common condition among…
QUESTION TYPE: Necessary Assumption
CONCLUSION: Cerebral edema is especially dangerous at high altitudes.
REASONING: Cerebral edema has symptoms that resemble those of ordinary mountain sickness. Cerebral edema can be fatal unless correctly treated from the start.
ANALYSIS: The argument is that it is hard to tell mountain sickness apart from cerebral edemas. So if cerebral enema occurs on a mountain we might misdiagnose it as mountain sickness. The patient could receive the wrong treatment and die.
The argument is assuming that the treatments are different. Otherwise a patient might receive the correct treatment even if people thought they had mountain sickness.
___________
- CORRECT. If the treatments are the same then there is no problem if an edema is misdiagnosed as mountain sickness. The patient will get the right treatment anyway.
- Even if a patient doesn’t slip into a coma they might still die, if they aren’t treated correctly from the onset.
- This shows that mountain sickness is less dangerous than a cerebral edema. But it doesn’t change the fact that the outward symptoms of both diseases are similar.
- Even if this weren’t true it would still be easy to confuse the two diseases.
- Even if people with mountain sickness are always given treatment it could still be the wrong treatment for edema.
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I do not understand why the analysis you made is necessarily true. Maybe the reaosn cerebral edema is especially dangerous at high altitudes is because the combination of cerebral edema with the sypmtoms of mountain sickness causes it to be especially dangerous. Who says the reason why it is dangerous is because it can be misdiagnosed?
The passage said cerebral edema is dangerous when misdiagnosed. The author says “Cerebral edema….quickly becomes life-threatening if not treated at the outset”. You can only treat it if you diagnose. So if you misdiagnose cerebral edema, you can’t treat it and it will quickly become life threatening.
Note: This is an old comment but I wanted to clarify the point.