Causality, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences
A Transdisciplinary Philosophy of Medicine Network
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
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”
Rani Lill Anjum
The evidence-based medicine movement was intended as a methodological revolution. Its proponents suggested the best way to establish the effectiveness of treatment and new criteria to choose between available treatments without bias. Philosophically, however, these changes were not so innocent, at least not ontologically speaking. In bringing itself closer to science, medicine has become less suitable for dealing with complex illnesses, individual variations and, as I will argue, with causation in general. Continue reading “Evidence based medicine. What evidence, whose medicine, and on what basis?”
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…”
by Stephen Mumford, Better Evidence for a Better Healthcare Manifesto
Science is a normative enterprise, it should be acknowledged, and this applies just as much to medical research. We need to know how empirical knowledge should be gathered. What methods and techniques should we employ in order for our results to be considered scientific? Indeed, we can think of the term ‘scientific’ as an honorific bestowed upon certain claims when they have been discovered and substantiated in the right way. It is plausible that science is actually constituted by the set of norms for its proper conduct. Continue reading “THE BEST EVIDENCE TENDS TO GET THE FACTS RIGHT”
By Elena Rocca
Pharmacology is a complex science that aims to balance harm and benefit of treatments for the individual patient. How should different types of evidence be synthesised in order to optimize this task? Should evidence from randomized trials be prioritized over other evidence, following the EBM model? If not, how can different types of evidence be amalgamated in an alternative way? Continue reading “Evidence synthesis in pharmacology”
Causality, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences 