Evaluation of General Sources

I decided to focus my post-mortem analysis on the controversy behind the price of prescription drugs designed for multiple sclerosis. Coming into the debate, I knew that pharmaceuticals argue that R&D investment demands large returns for high risk, and that patients counter that these medications are life-altering yet unobtainable. I wanted to find out more about how much these drugs' costs have risen, and what underlying causes drive their price.

The first article I used to establish context was a 2014 journal article in Neurology. 

• The article's URL was http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/, a government database housing the National Library of Medicine. This website is the domain for all pubmed articles, and is a database for peer-reviewed journal articles. The site is highly credible because it is government-sponsored and continuously updated. 

• The authors, Daniel Hartung, Dennis Bourdette and Ruth Whitham, are medical researchers at Oregon Health and Sciences University--a prestigious medical school and research facility. This particular manuscript was published on May 25th, 2015, but the PUBMED website was last updated two minutes before my search. Its purpose is definitely to inform, and to provide up-to-date research on the costs and inflation of MS drugs between 1993 and 2013. 

• There are plenty of graphics, and they are disheartening. Costs for MS drugs have grown exponentially, and there are figures showing that they have grown at a much faster clip than prescription drugs generally and even faster than the notoriously overpriced tumor suppressor drugs. As for the position on the subject, two of the researchers acknowledged receiving grant funding from Biogen Idec and Chugai Pharmaceutical. If anything, this may make them biased in favor of drug-makers. However, the research paper primarily highlighted skyrocketing costs of these drugs, and readers walk away with the notion that these drugs are far overvalued. At the end of the article, the works cited page links to forty additional articles for further reading.

Gotskan, Paul. "Scientific Review." 1/31/2016 via Google Images. Licensed under Public Domain Access.

The second article was written by a person with multiple sclerosis who was trying to cope with the costs of her medication. 

• The article was posted to the URL msfocus.org, the website of the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation. The organization is non-profit and seeks to better the lives of patients with MS. They are likely much more patient-focused and won't provide a perspective from the pharmaceutical industry.

• The author, Ann Pietrangelo, has MS and must pay her insurance premiums to keep her prescriptions. In this sense, she has primary evidence for how soaring costs affects the lives of MS patients. She also is a freelance writer and focuses on articles relating to multiple sclerosis. This portion of the website was last updated in 2013, making it slightly outdated. Nonetheless, hyperlinks functioned properly, and many self-help articles were available for coping with MS. The purpose of this article was to give an insider perspective to how the raw data affects real people. Yes, drug costs are soaring as a statistical fact, but reading Ann's story was heartbreaking. 

• The article lacked graphics, and this is because its primary purpose wasn't to reveal data or 'hard facts'. There is certainly bias in the author's position, because she approaches the problem from the sole perspective of the consumer/patient. There is no real regard for the economic considerations of a drug manufacturer, because this is the story of an individual. In addition, there are no further links except one to a blog hosted by Ann. This is because the story doesn't refer to specific data--it is humanistic rather than informative.