Category: 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.

Continue reading “Open access chapter”

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.

Continue reading “Philosophy of Science in Practice on the Modern Pain podcast”

Complexity; simplified – A video chat on the complex patient, causation, and manual therapy with Walt Fritz, Stephen King and Rani Lill Anjum

The video chat was recorded by Stephen King, co-founder of Vocal Health Education, and appears in the second tier qualification they offer; The Vocal Health Practitioner. Watch the video on physical therapist Walt Fritz‘s website, Foundations in Manual Therapy – Science Informed Manual Therapy Education, where he also offers a range of educational resources on patient centred manual care.

CAUSAL DISPOSITIONS IN RISK ANALYSIS

Capture 3Technology should make our life better, easier and safer. And yet, medicines, pesticides, nanotechnologies, biotechnologies et cetera, may represent a potential threat to health and environment. Some of the new technologies might be safe for most, but they could still be harmful for vulnerable individuals, communities or ecosystems. Continue reading “CAUSAL DISPOSITIONS IN RISK ANALYSIS”

Living with complexity and big data. Causal dispositionalim enters pharmacovigilance

Ralph Edwards on dispositionalism in pharmacovigilance

We have seen a lot of interest in the CauseHealth approach and issues during these last years, especially among clinicians who see a need for a more person centered healthcare. Can this be useful also outside the clinic? Yes, according to senior medical advisor at the WHO Uppsala Monitoring Center for Drug Safety, Ralph Edwards. In a recent perspectives article in the UMC report, he argues that dispositionalism can be useful for dealing with complexity, individual variation and the patient’s unique context. Continue reading “Living with complexity and big data. Causal dispositionalim enters pharmacovigilance”

CauseHealth goes to Evidence Live

Evidence-live-2-date

Evidence Live is an annual conference, jointly hosted by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford and The BMJ. This year, CauseHealth was represented in two of the sessions, by Elena Rocca and Rani Lill Anjum. Continue reading “CauseHealth goes to Evidence Live”

What if…

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Author Anna Luise Kirkengen
(#2 of the Whole Person reflections series)

What if one would weave a text by means of threads coloured by the recent topics of the on-going CauseHealth project. One thread would be causality, and how it is understood and applied in current biomedicine. Another would be ontology in the sense of how a human being and the human body is conceptualised in medicine and how this concept underpins the Western health care systems. A third thread would be methodology, and how the predominant methods for knowledge production, group based, randomised trials often including thousands of patients, might be radically challenged by the concept of N=1. A fourth thread would be stories in the sense of biographies before a person fell ill, and stories in the sense of testimonies of being ill – and how these have been systematically avoided as possible source of contamination in medical knowledge production. A fifth thread would then be knowledge condensates as these have grown both in number and normativity in the shape of clinical guidelines in all medical specialties during the latest years. Together, these threads can form quite different pictures, dependent on the frame applied. Continue reading “What if…”

Better Evidence for Better Healthcare Manifesto: the CauseHealth Perspective.

The “Better Evidence for Better Healthcare Manifesto” initiative was recently launched by the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) in collaboration with the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

The manifesto is motivated by a series of problems and blind spots in the implementation of EBM: lack of high quality evidence, systematic research errors, under-reporting of harm, insufficient inclusion of patient’s priorities are some of the issues named by the Manifesto’s promoters. The purpose of the initiative is to spot what could be changed and how, in order to improve the current situation. Continue reading “Better Evidence for Better Healthcare Manifesto: the CauseHealth Perspective.”