Rani Lill Anjum

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.

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.)