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”

How do we care for the unique patient within evidence based practice?

Link to YouTube recording

Roger Kerry, Rani Lill Anjum, Christine Price, Joost van Wijchen

A guided dialogue between the challenges of caring for the unique patient within EBP. Exploring causality, complexity, mindlines and dispositionalism. Diving into CauseHealth.

Ton Satink, Maria Nordheim Alme, Matthew Low, Evie Martin, Paul Beenen, Ayca Corekci, Laura Rathbone, Sigurd Mikkelsen, Vegard Pihl Moen, Nokuthula Zulu, Beth Potter 

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.

Causality in Psychotherapy Research

Dr Hanne Oddli, Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, is a clinical psychologist, and researcher. In this video she presents the ongoing work promoting evidential pluralism in psychotherapy research based on a dispositionalist understanding of causality.

Continue reading “Causality in Psychotherapy Research”

Open access CauseHealth resource for clinicians

A multidisciplinary book dealing with the philosophical biases that tacitly motivate evidence based and person centered clinical practice.

Short presentation video

Access and download the book for free on the Springer webpage.

Long presentation video

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”

CauseHealth workshop N=1 is now a section in JECP special issue.

Capture

The Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice has dedicated a section of its latest special issue to collect seven contributions which were previously presented in the CauseHealth workshop N=1. A further contribution from the same workshop was published by the same journal last year. Continue reading “CauseHealth workshop N=1 is now a section in JECP special issue.”