Despite the lingering popularity of alternative health treat

Having the same thought.
If the minds of the people are already biased, the survey results could be misleading.

Pre - thinking : Author says " for such injuries, let go of alternative therapies and use traditional methods to cure " . This means the author believes that traditional
methods are better. Lets look at options and see if we have anything on these lines :

A. Other alternative therapies, such as aromatherapy, are not more effective than acupuncture or chiropractic medicine. Out of scope

B. Traditional methods of treatment have a higher success rate than that of alternative therapies. Sounds fine Hold it

C. The survey participants had no reservations about the therapy methods they chose prior to receiving treatment. Whether they had reservations or not, it does not fill the missing link. If at all we choose this, we are bringing our general knowledge to solve the question and that is an absolute no - no

D. No respondent had used any form of traditional treatment prior to the survey. sounds fine to me

E. A combination of traditional and alternative therapies is the most optimal way to treat musculoskeletal aliments. does not lead to the stated conclusion

Down to Option B & D :
B is clearly more aligned with our pre thinking than D.


Let me try to explain more on why D is wrong :

If we negate Option D , : "Respondents had used traditional treatment prior to the survey".

Now this doesn't indicate if the treatment was effective, if the treatment cured them.

The results can be both - the traditional treatment was not effective, therefore they turned to alternative therapy ;
the alternative therapy was not effective, therefore they turned to traditional treatment.

In all probability (sends me into tizzy, in quant ), the option D does not void the argument when negated.

Hope it helps.

The conclusion is asking the group to go for traditional therapies , hence we need to look for an assumption which need to be inherent
as to why the author is pushing for traditional theory , this is well supported in Choice B.

Choice D is on a different track which is not supporting the conclusion to the level B does

Since doubt is between B and D, let me just focus on these two :

Premise : Survey - People who used alternative therapies had little success.
Conclusion : Traditional is better

Though the conclusion is about Traditional methods, there is no mention of it anywhere

Suppose there are two methods A and B :

We can't say

A succ rate = 0.1
Therefore B is better;
As we have no information about B. This question plays with your prejudice. success rate of B could be 99.999 or it could be 0.00001. You are stuck in your head because you think traditional methods are better but here those are just words. We have no info on traditional medicine whatsoever.

Therefore the correct assumption would compare success of A and B

As you can see, option B does that perfectly

Now coming to D. No respondent had used any form of traditional treatment prior to the survey.

So people tried method A for first time. Didn't work. So does that mean B will surely work?

No... we again need to compare the base rate. Without having any info about B, the conclusion is meaningless.


Only option B holds.

C. The survey participants had no reservations about the therapy methods they chose prior to receiving treatment.

Even If the minds of the people are biased, and the survey results could be misleading, the argument is still valid. The conclusion - People, with such injuries are, thus, well advised to forego alternative therapies in favor of traditional, interventive methods of treatment. – is still valid; Premise C may weaken or strengthen the argument – we do not know in what direction – but its negation will not invalidate the argument.
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The two best choices for this question are
B. Traditional methods of treatment have a higher success rate than that of alternative therapies. using negation technique, in case the success rate of traditional therapies is not higher than that of alternative therapies, then there is no rationale to shift
C. The survey participants had no reservations about the therapy methods they chose prior to receiving treatment. Using negation technique,
if they had reservations then what? if it is effective then it makes sense for them to shift.

Option E is interesting and would be the correct choice if it was just negated.

I completely agree with you. Everyone is bound to have a preconceived notion of the therapies they choose, and they depend primarily on the conditions in which they live, the society around them, their social status, the traditions in which they grew up, and many, many other factors. So, for example, it will be very difficult to convince a resident of New York that alternative therapies such as acupuncture and others will be more effective than traditional treatments at an urban clinic. It would be difficult to explain to a villager in the mountains of Tibet about the effectiveness of modern methods of treatment, some methods I learned about relatively recently when I ordered custom essays on https://writemypapers4me.net/custom-writing-service/. And lastly, both for the former and for the latter, traditional methods and alternative methods will be completely different