medium · LSAT Logical Reasoning
A pharmaceutical company developed a new drug that was shown in clinical trials to be significantly more effective at treating a specific condition than the existing standard medication. However, when the drug was released to the general public, the percentage of patients who saw improvement in their condition was lower than the percentage of patients who improved using the standard medication.
Which one of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the apparent paradox?
- The condition the drug treats is one that often resolves on its own over time, even when the patient receives no medical treatment whatsoever for it.
- The standard medication, sold for more than twenty years now, has a side-effect profile that physicians regard as thoroughly and reliably documented.
- Because the new drug costs appreciably more than the standard one, a portion of eligible patients deliberately elect to remain on the older, cheaper treatment.
- The new drug needs a far more intricate dosing schedule that ordinary patients routinely fail to follow, whereas trial subjects were closely supervised.
- The new drug proved so dramatically superior in the trials that experts confidently predicted it would soon render the standard medication wholly obsolete.
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