Rani Lill Anjum

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.

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 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.)