Critical Reasoning

Editorial: In a compelling preponderance of clinical trials, patients who were administered sugar pills on a daily basis reported equally significant improvements in mood as did those patients who were administered FDA-approved antidepressants. \ Most insurance policies offer policy members only limited coverage for prescriptions of antidepressants, and consequently most such drugs carry an almost prohibitive out-of-pocket cost to consumers. Therefore, medical practitioners (and the media) have a duty to make these clinical findings known to the public, so that those patients who would benefit from such drugs may begin to administer equally effective (and eminently affordable) treatment to themselves, straight out of the kitchen cabinet.

Which of the following, if true, is most damaging to the editorialist's argument?

A> Each of the clinical trials was conducted over a relatively short period of time, and antidepressants often incite an initial spike in mood which is followed by a return to the original melancholy.

B> The clinical trials based their assessment of mood improvements solely on self-reported data; no objective physiological indicators were measured.

C> The improvements in mood were primarily attributable to the participants' ongoing belief throughout the trials that they were taking prescription antidepressants.

D> Due to necessary discounting of some participants' data, the total number of subjects in the sugar pill groups was far greater than the total number of subjects in the FDA-approved antidepressant groups.

E> Most people would be skeptical that taking a substance as common as sugar would bring about a noticeable increase in their mood.