Causality, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences

A digital CauseHealth course for health professionals

Photo credits: UMC – WHO Uppsala Monitoring Centre

We, Elena Rocca and Rani Lill Anjum, are now debating whether to establish a new CauseHealth teaching course. The course would be directed at health professionals and others who might be interested in learning more about causality, complexity and evidence for health sciences from a philosophy of science perspective.

In the last years, we have both been teaching and presenting CauseHealth material to various health professionals, but we think the time is right to offer something more structured, available, flexible and predictable.

Course themes could include (but please suggest more):

Philosophical bias (basic implicit assumptions) in health sciences and how they influence healthcare practice
The clinical squeeze between populations and the unique individual
Complexity, reductionism, and the biomedical model
Risk and safety as statistical frequencies or individual propensities
Ontological and epistemological tensions between evidence based and person centered practice
Why one size does not fit all in healthcare
Other ideas?

Possible formats could be (but please suggest other):

Digitally available course material + 2 or 3 weekends or evenings with online lectures and group discussions (3 hours each)
An offer of smaller modules where one can choose one or more micro-courses (4 hours each, plus some reading and preparations)
An intensive course that runs over 3 days
A flexible course that runs over 3 months
Other alternatives?

We would love to hear from you if you think this could be interesting, and what content and formats could be more suitable or relevant.

When it comes to expected costs, Norwegian continuous education is not very expensive, since the norm is that education is free of charge. But for continuous education, a fee of 400-700 Euros would be quite standard, since the universities will have to cover the expenses for course administration and teaching.

Access to all course material (articles, books, etc.) would be open access or included in the fee.

Open access chapter

You might already know this, but there’s a new book out, edited by Federica Russo and Phyllis Illari: Routledge Handbook of Causality and Causal Methods, published in 2024. Now you can read or download for free the chapter ‘When Decisions Must Be Based on Partial Causal Knowledge‘, by Fredrik Andersen, Rani Lill Anjum and Elena Rocca.

Philosophy of Science in Practice on the Modern Pain podcast

This week Elena Rocca and Rani Lill Anjum spoke to Mark Kargela on his Modern Pain Podcast. We discussed the new Philosophy of Science book, published this summer.

Bringing the patient’s perspectives forward in drug development and healthcare evaluation

By Keith Meadows and Matt Reaney

For many years psychologists and other social scientists have been pushing for the individual patient’s perspective – priorities, needs, feelings and functioning – to be incorporated into drug development. This is usually achieved through the use of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) in clinical trials. The development and use of PROMs situates them at the vertex of two very different trends in medicine: patient-centred care and standardization. Indeed the application of PROMs – which pull in the direction of standardisation – results in a narrow conception of evidence by overriding the subjectivity of individual experiences, beliefs and judgments. Without additional context, PROM data cannot easily support individual patient-level care. When collected systematically and with an interpretive phenomenological approach, narrative data can contain valuable information about the patient experience that numerical ratings from PRO measures do not capture.

New CauseHealth publication: causality assessment and pharmacovigilance

Read the full paper here.

What can Plato’s Allegory of the Cave tell us about knowledge translation?

Perspectives on Physiotherapy

The allegory of the cave is a famous passage in the history of philosophy. It is a short excerpt from the beginning of Plato’s book, The Republic (1). There are a number of different interpretations of the allegory, but the one that I would like to present is within the context of education, specifically knowledge translation and the content, style and manner of its delivery. I would like to conclude with relating this to how we, as health care professionals, present knowledge within a professional dialogue.

Plato’s Cave

Imagine a group of prisoners who have been chained since they were children in an underground cave. Their hands, feet, and necks are chained so that they are unable to move. All they can see in front of them, for their entire lives, is the back wall of the cave.

Plato's Cave

“Some way off, behind and higher up, a fire is…

View original post 1,547 more words

Toward a just mental health service

by Rolf Sundet

Rolf is Specialist in clinical psychology and Professor Emeritus, University of South-Eastern Norway, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, Department of Health, Social and Welfare Studies, Centre for Mental Health and Substance Abuse.

In June 1972 I got off the bus outside the village of Lier, Norway, slowly walking towards the regional mental hospital. I was 18 years old with both anxiety and tense expectation about this new experience; working as a nursing assistant in a mental hospital. I was received by the nursing principal who informed me that I was to work on Ward 23. I was sent on a round to get my nursing assistant uniform, keys and a place to stay. My living quarters was in a house named the House of Brothers.

WHAT NEXT? Reality-testing systemic resistance towards treating the whole person, the unique patient

Brian Broom, immunologist, psychotherapist and CauseHealth senior advisor

Most Western clinicians who pursue a person-centred approach to physical illness experience significant resistance from colleagues and health institutions. At first glance this may seem strange. Wouldn’t everybody want to be person-centred and oriented to the unique patient? Isn’t it obvious that the appearance and development of disease is commonly multi-causal and multidimensional? Surely anyone can see that disease is a manifestation or representation within, and of, the ‘whole’, whether that ‘whole’ is the presenting individual, or a bigger ‘whole’, such as family or culture. But life is not so simple. (This blog post is an extract. Read the long text here.)

How do we care for the unique patient within evidence based practice?

Link to YouTube recording

Roger Kerry, Rani Lill Anjum, Christine Price, Joost van Wijchen

A guided dialogue between the challenges of caring for the unique patient within EBP. Exploring causality, complexity, mindlines and dispositionalism. Diving into CauseHealth.

Ton Satink, Maria Nordheim Alme, Matthew Low, Evie Martin, Paul Beenen, Ayca Corekci, Laura Rathbone, Sigurd Mikkelsen, Vegard Pihl Moen, Nokuthula Zulu, Beth Potter

Our very long book launch in podcast episodes

As you might have noticed, CauseHealth has joined forces with Oliver Thomson and his Words Matter podcast! As an introduction to our book for new readers – or as an extra resource for old readers – we wanted to have one podcast episodes for each book chapter, where Oliver interviews the author(s) of that chapter. It is going really well, and we have now covered all of Part 1, setting up the philosophical framework of dispositionalism, and are now moving on to Part 2, of clinical applications, showing how that framework can be used in practice. Today, episode 7 was released, where Christine Price talks about how she encountered philosophy of dispositions and causation and how she then used this to understand and manage her own chronic pain. You find this and other episodes on the Words Matter webpage!