5. Medicine in the broadest terms
Include all clinical, scientific, and political forms
of engagement with health and disease
Not just biomedicine
Not just EBM
5
6. Medicine as a ‘disunion’
Include forms of practice sometimes not recognised as
’medicine’, e.g.:
Clinical practice, including primary care and hospital medicine
Preventive medicine and public health (more policy-oriented)
Epidemiology
Aim to capture major theories and approaches, including:
Evidence-based practice and associated practice like guideline
development and evidence reviews
Narrative medicine
Personalised medicine
Gender medicine
6
10. (Some) phil sci questions in medicine
The method
Modes of explanation
Sources of evidence
Knowledge and action
10
11. The end of RCT predominance?
The quantitative turn in medicine (and beyond)
Any role for qualitative observations and
studies?
Integration rather than competition?
11
12. What kind of phenomena are
health & disease?
The biologisation, molecularisation, and
personalisation of disease
Any role for social, psychological, behavioural
factors?
Integration rather than distinction?
12
13. Conceptualising and explaining
health & disease
Aetiology
Causes of disease, of recovery, of well being
(Causal) Mechanisms
Of disease development, of drug action, of the
individual’s environment
13
14. Where we should we get
the relevant information?
Surveys, interviews, case reports, …
Evidence of
Correlation / difference-making
Mechanisms (functioning)
14
15. What you do if you knew that…
‘How much’ must / should we
Establish before claiming that we understand
Health, disease, treatments
Know before we take appropriate action
Individual treatments and public health interventions
Wait before we implement changes
Adverse drug reactions, ineffective treatments, …
15
17. Phil Sci approaches to causality
A straightjacket to bridle phenomena?
Traditional accounts
In search of univocal definitions
Applicable anywhere
Or a lens through which reading scientific methods?
CitS / PSP / PI
In search for networks of concepts
Respond to scientific / philosophical / societal challenges
17
18. Philosophical fields expanding
Philosophy of medicine
From medical ethics and
definition of disease to
epistemology and
methodology of medicine
Philosophy of causation
From finding THE ONE
definition of causation to
understanding the role of
causal notions in several
scientific practices
Causation in medicine:
Provide an understanding of many ways in which
medicine studies and intervenes
on causes and effects of health and disease
18
20. Causal mosaics
A reconstruction of how causal questions arise
in medicine
Making philosophical / methodological /
practical sense of them
20
21. What does it look like?
A dynamic picture that includes ‘tiles’ about:
Scientific challenges
Inference, explanation, prediction, control, reasoning
Philosophical questions
Metaphysics, epistemology, methodology, semantics, use
Specific accounts
Counterfactuals, mechanisms, processes, probabilities,
information, agency, INUS, variation, regularity, …
21
26. Research Questions
Overarching research question [Q]:
How can evidence of mechanisms be considered
alongside evidence of correlation to evaluate
causal claims in medical research and health
policy?
The answer to this overarching question will build
on answers to following questions:
[EM: Evidence of Mechanisms]:
What is evidence of a mechanism, and how do we
get it?
[QE: Quality of Evidence]:
How can quality of evidence be characterised?
[PC: Philosophy of Causality]:
Which accounts of causality best fit the
programme for integrating evidence of
mechanisms with evidence of correlation?
26
27. People
Christian Wallmann, Michael Wilde, Jon Williamson
Centre for Reasoning, University of Kent
Brendan Clarke, Donald Gillies, Phyllis Illari
Department of Science and Technology Studies,
University College London (UCL)
Federica Russo
Department of Philosophy, University of
Amsterdam (UvA)
Partners
The National Institute for Health and Clinical
Excellence (NICE)
The International Agency for Research on Cancer
(IARC)
The Institute of Public Health at Cambridge
University
The Medical School at Leiden University
27
29. Expanding domains
Philosophy of Science
Beyond – and back – to more inclusive ways of
studying science
(Philosophy of) Medicine
Beyond questions about ethics, closer to concerns
of phil sci
29
30. A convergence of interests
Medicine
and the
Philosophy
of Science
Methods and
concepts of
medicine
• RCTs, mechanisms,
evidence, …
Conceptualisations
of health & disease
• Bio-social
phenomena, …
Societal relevance
• The value of the
humanities, …
30
Notes de l'éditeur
In the last decade or so philosophers of science started paying attention to medicine, broadly construed. Before, medicine was primarily in the target of ethicists or anthropologists, but not so much philosophers of science. Conversely, philosophy of science was - before - occupied with questions arising in the natural sciences and, to a lesser extent, to the social sciences. In this talk I offer an overview of the main questions occupying the debate and I explain why this turn in philosophy of science is noteworthy.
Motivate need to discuss ‘causation in medicine’. Understanding it with respect to the crossing of two fields: phil med and phil cause
I’d like to make a comment here about things that philmed in general could usefully acquire from causation in medicine. Definitions of disease as paradigm case (after Caplan): neither of interest to practitioners, nor philosophers more generally.