During the first week, volunteers continued to take their usual sleeping medication. They slept soundly but wakened feeling tired. At the beginning of the second week, the volunteers discontinued their sleeping medication. During that week, they slept les

The author of the statement above assumes that the scent of lavender is proved to be the cure for insomnia. This conclusion is based on an experiment conducted on 30 volunteers with chronic insomnia. The statement lacks several vital evidences to lead us to the make same conclusion as the author’s does.

First, the author needs to provide evidence showing the length of the patients sleep was enough. What mentioned in the statement informs us that they slept soundly, but there is no evidence to answer how long their sleep pattern was. It is possible that the length of their sleep has never reached the sufficient time that they felt tired.

Speaking of tiredness, secondly, the author did not mention the amount of feeling tired at the end of the experiment. Even if the volunteers slept soundly and long, they might still be tired. Then there is still a problem with such a curing system. Sleeping is supposed to provide energy for people, the mere process of sleeping is not enough if the patient who wakes up is too tired to begin the day energetically.

Thirdly, the author needs to provide evidence which shows that the treatment works without medications more than a mere two-week period. Assuming that all of the results were proven that this method is effective, the insomnia might relapse after the two weeks of the experiment. Thus, in order to show that the cure effectively deracinates insomnia, the author needs to assess this method in more than a two-week period.

Finally, the experiment is conducted on 30 individuals with chronic insomnia. The author needs evidence showing us that in this experiment a comprehensive range of insomniac patients is involved. Although all the volunteers had chronic insomnia, the intensity of their symptoms is not known. It is highly possible that their responses to lavender scents are different from those that have acute insomnia. Furthermore, what is the ethnicity of the volunteers? What is the range of ages in that experiment? The sex of volunteers is also important. With each of the parameters in the experiment differing from the other people outside the experiment, the conclusion cannot be generalized.

In short, there are several vital evidences without which the statement fails to be persuasive. The enumerated evidence would change the author’s current argument having equivocal conditions to a clear one. Then the argument can be evaluated.