Read the full paper here.
New CauseHealth publication: causality assessment and pharmacovigilance
Category: Medicine
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.)
Continue reading “WHAT NEXT? Reality-testing systemic resistance towards treating the whole person, the unique patient”New CauseHealth resource in progress for healthcare professionals
Instead of a normal final report for the CauseHealth project, we decided to write an open access book specifically for healthcare professionals. The book is meant as a resource for those interested in the relationship between their daily practice and the philosophical assumptions that motivate this practice. Continue reading “New CauseHealth resource in progress for healthcare professionals”
A patient experience
Unless we are extremely lucky, we have all been patients within a health system. I now also theorize about it. It might be that the Cause Health project immediately resonated with me because of my own early experiences. Continue reading “A patient experience”
Living with complexity and big data. Causal dispositionalim enters 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”
DATA AND THEORY: NEW CAUSEHEALTH PAPER ABOUT THE PROBLEM OF WEIGHING COMPLEX EVIDENCE IN MEDICINE.
by Elena Rocca
In the early 19th century, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis noticed from his clinical experience that antiseptic routines in healthcare reduced infections at childbirth. After carrying out some studies on the matter, he proposed that the practice of disinfecting hands in the obstetrician ward of the Vienna General Hospital, where he worked at the time, would have reduced the incidence of puerperal fever. However, for that time this seemed as an implausible suggestion. The germ theory of disease was still unheard of (Pasteur developed such theory only some decades later), and therefore there was no accepted understanding of how disease could be transmitted from one organism to the other. Semmelweis suggestion was therefore rejected by the medical community. Continue reading “DATA AND THEORY: NEW CAUSEHEALTH PAPER ABOUT THE PROBLEM OF WEIGHING COMPLEX EVIDENCE IN MEDICINE.”
CauseHealth goes to Evidence Live
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”
Glasses and Blind Spots: Through the Eyes of a Tester
Author Wenche Schrøder Bjorbækmo
(#4 in the Whole Person reflections series)
The test’s glasses and blind spots – seen through the confession and experience of a tester. Continue reading “Glasses and Blind Spots: Through the Eyes of a Tester”
Does your regular GP know you – as a person? And if so, does it matter?
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?”
What if…
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…”
Causality, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences 