Causality, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences
A Transdisciplinary Philosophy of Medicine Network
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”
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”The allegory of the cave is a famous passage in the history of philosophy. It is a short excerpt from the beginning of Plato’s book, The Republic (1). There are a number of different interpretations of the allegory, but the one that I would like to present is within the context of education, specifically knowledge translation and the content, style and manner of its delivery. I would like to conclude with relating this to how we, as health care professionals, present knowledge within a professional dialogue.
Plato’s Cave
Imagine a group of prisoners who have been chained since they were children in an underground cave. Their hands, feet, and necks are chained so that they are unable to move. All they can see in front of them, for their entire lives, is the back wall of the cave.
“Some way off, behind and higher up, a fire is…
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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”
As you might have noticed, CauseHealth has joined forces with Oliver Thomson and his Words Matter podcast! As an introduction to our book for new readers – or as an extra resource for old readers – we wanted to have one podcast episodes for each book chapter, where Oliver interviews the author(s) of that chapter. It is going really well, and we have now covered all of Part 1, setting up the philosophical framework of dispositionalism, and are now moving on to Part 2, of clinical applications, showing how that framework can be used in practice. Today, episode 7 was released, where Christine Price talks about how she encountered philosophy of dispositions and causation and how she then used this to understand and manage her own chronic pain. You find this and other episodes on the Words Matter webpage!
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.
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”
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”
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)”
by Stephen Tyreman
This is an extract from a recent article written by Stephen Tyreman for the International Journal of Osteopathic Medicine. The full text can be found here.
Understanding what person-centred means is much more complex and multi-factorial than I once assumed. It is not merely a question of considering a person’s individual needs and concerns and putting them first. It is recognising that human beings face up to the challenge of illness, pain and disability differently from how we might understand and seek to correct a fault in a car, say. Continue reading “A personal reflection on person-centred care and the role of stories in healthcare”
Causality, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences 