Being A Wise Consumer

Research reports provide additional insights to an already established knowledge. However, it is more important to critically analyze the components of the report in order to identify the degree of its credibility. The story in reference is Newsweek’s report titled ‘The Price of Pain’. Basically, the report provides an understanding of how back pain treatments are perceived today as to whether these procedures are actually effective.

The increase of medical technology apparently has not alleviated the pains suffered by the patients both physically and financially (Springen, 2008).

In terms of theoretical underpinnings, the report provided an elusive understanding that not all medical advancements are beneficial. Seemingly, the interviewed individuals in the article affirm that less complicated treatments are ideal for today’s younger generation of back pain sufferers. It is also a good notion to analyze the technical aspects of the article’s research procedures to critically understand the report. In the aspect of research design, the study proponent conducted an informal survey among health and insurance institutions which provided the year to date reports of back pain treatment cases.

These reports also provided gross amounts of equivalent thousand dollars worth of back pain treatments. The main methodology of the article report was to integrate available publications such as those coming from Journal of the American Medical Association. This procedure also enabled the Newsweek report to do data collection procedures by retrieving numerical figures of medical service inflations and the percentage of adults which had back problems from 1997 to 2005. In any case, this type of data gathering is more ideal since it took the publication less time and effort to present credible results.

In terms of analysis and the reporting of findings, the article didn’t’ actually provided additional insights apart from the delegated info retrieved from the third party agencies. Although the complete presentation of data related to the concern was provided, the report lacks the essence of inputting at least an unbiased opinion or secondary analysis method. As a way to improve the report, it is suggested that the article incorporates a structured analysis of the problem instead of just giving examples.

Of course, it should not be too technical in presenting more logical reasoning since this type of media publication do not actually follow scholarly research. But adding some more factors to induce decisions for the readers would have been more appropriate. Apparently, the most evident errors the article committed are its redundant use of examples from outside resources, becoming subjective of what is expensive and what is not and the lack of segmented citations which made the article hover randomly from book authors to government institutions to school researches.

Being able to critically analyze a public report can provide greater personal ability of decision making. This empowers the readers to take advantage of the available data which can be very useful for personalized decision making tasks. References Springen, K. 2008. The Price of Pain. Newsweek-Health. Retrieved February 13, 2008 from http://www. newsweek. com/id/110767/page/1.