Causality, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences
A Transdisciplinary Philosophy of Medicine Network
CauseHealth is pleased to announce “Towards a Person Centered Healthcare and Practice” – a conference on philosophy, persons and value. This event is in memory of our friend and CauseHealth collaborator, Stephen Tyreman.
Continue reading “Conference – “Towards a Person Centered Healthcare and Practice” (10 May 2019)”
Written by Bente Prytz Mjølstad
(#3 of the Whole Person reflections series)
Have you ever thought about whether your regular GP knows more about you than your blood pressure or cholesterol levels? If so, might such knowledge be of any medical relevance?
Most of us visit our regular GP once or twice a year for more or less trivial complaints, and you are probably most interested in the GPs medical skills, and not so concerned about whether the doctor knows you as person or not. However, if you got seriously ill or had a chronic illness, would it still not matter? Continue reading “Does your regular GP know you – as a person? And if so, does it matter?”
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…”
Author Brian Broom
(#1 of the Whole Person reflections series)
How is it possible to be whole person-oriented and still feel that our work is manageable? Surely, we can’t be all things to all people? Continue reading “Imagination and its Companions”
By David Evans
In a paper with a very long title, recently published in Medicine Health Care and Philosophy, Roger Kerry, Nic Lucas and I set out some ideas about how causation applies to relationships between health and disease. In particular, we focused on how treatment (intervention) might act to limit disease and restore health. Continue reading “What is the form of causation in health and disease, and intervention?”
By Neil Maltby — author of the becomingmorehuman blog, a physiotherapist in the UK, and a CauseHealth collaborator
She seemed straight forward enough on assessment. 45yrs old. Sudden pain onset from a seemingly innocuous movement many years ago. Episodic but progressive back pain since. Almost full range of movement. No significant neurological, inflammatory, vascular or other suspicious signs. One thing did sit in my mind though. It was as I asked her to reach down to the floor. Continue reading “You’re History (Hasta la Vista, baby)”
Medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) represent a major challenge for healthcare systems in industrialised countries. These symptoms are so prevalent that they are assessed in up to 50% of consultations in primary care. The repeated referral of these patients to secondary care represents a substantial cost, but not a resolution of the symptoms which often remain unexplained. Continue reading “Can medicine explain medically unexplained symptoms?”
By Rani Lill Anjum (@ranilillanjum)
This is a blog for the research project Causation, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences (CauseHealth). Allow me to present the team and some of our ideas. Continue reading “Welcome to the CauseHealth blog!”
Causality, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences 