PT3.S2.Q14 - Physicians in training

isdmyung

Stimulus (paraphrased)
Pamela: physicians in training work long, up to 36 hours, shifts and that fatigue impairs their ability to make the best medical decisions during final portions of their shift.
Quincy: Thousands of physicians have gone through this regiment with records to show that the system works. So why change now?

Though I realize I need to work in the stimulus to pick my answers, as someone who has worked shifts before, I know that your relief does not generally show up generously early. So if these physicians work up to 36 hours, they are in the long haul and that fatigue can be a very real risk to decision making towards the end.

Anyways, with everything in mind above, I was left with AC B vs C.
I picked AC C because of my influence from experience...hear me out: emergency-room patients needing continuity of physician care over the critical period after admission, generally 24 hours, would seem as though at any given crucial moment, the expectation would that a physician is able to make the best medical decisions. In the event where there is not a generous overlap between turnovers from one shift to the next, that leaves patients in critical conditions reliant on potentially fatigued physicians that are towards the end of their 36 hour shift. That is why I thought, this would be enough to counter Quincy's argument. Yes, the physicians do need to better working conditions to minimize fatigue that could impair medical decisions.

Meanwhile, AC B has me understanding it as there will be more seriously ill patients during their stay at the hospital than before. I felt like I had to draw an inference on this one. While not everyone in an emergency room may not be in a life threatening state, I guess AC B paints a better picture with more people requiring more attention and the need for best medical decisions??

Please help

st_cupertino

Hi!
disclaimer: I am not a mega expert at LR (-5/-6 timed, but 0/-2 untimed), but here is my thought process..

I agree that it is important to not insert your own knowledge into the answer choices, which is really hard to do sometimes! It gets me too! I think the best approach here to choose between two answers is by looking for ways in which one of them can be wrong.
With a critical mindset toward C-
"continuity of physician care."
- What does Quincy have to say about this? He is only focusing his argument on the fact that generally, good medical decisions have been made in the past. We don't really know what he thinks about continuity of physician care. Thought experiment: He could agree with that point and say, "So what? I think we have good continuity of care as of now, just look at our good track record of medical decisions! We don't need to make changes to our training."

We have to remember that our counter argument to Quincy should address a point he made, or else we are just brining in new information that we cannot definitively say that he disagrees with or not.

With that in mind, let's go to answer choice B:
If this were true, it would directly contradict Quincy. This would show a reason how the medical situations now are different now than what they were in the past. What worked in the past may not necessarily work now if this is true.

Hope this helps!