Tag Archives: The Reasoner

In the Reasoner: The Russo-Williamson thesis

The next issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences is currently in progress, but some articles from the forthcoming issue have recently been made available online first. One article is by Alexander R. Fiorentino (Public Health and Community Medicine, Tufts) and Olaf Dammann (Public Health and Community Medicine, Tufts & Gynecology and Obstetrics, Hannover Medical School) and is on the topic of the Russo-Williamson thesis.

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In The Reasoner: Statins

The ongoing debate over the use of statins has been covered extensively in the mainstream media. Recently, Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, has expressed concern that the lack of resolution to debates such as this is damaging public confidence in medicine. In response, Davies concluded that what is needed is “an authoritative independent report looking at how society should judge the safety and efficacy of drugs as an intervention.” As a result, the Academy of Medical Sciences has begun a working group project on Evaluating evidence. The aim of the project is to “explore how evidence that originates from different sources (e.g. randomised clinical trials and observational data) are used to make decisions about the safety and efficacy of drugs and medical interventions.”

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In The Reasoner: on therapeutic inferences for individual patients.

This month sees the publication of a philosophy themed edition of the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. The edition contains a number of articles on the nature of health, disease, diagnosis and care, and a section on rethinking medical epistemology. There is also a debates section, which is made up of responses to papers from a previous edition of the journal. The topics discussed there include the nature of causality and also whether evidence-based medicine is failing as a result of industry contamination of research. I recommend that interested readers of The Reasoner take a look at the edition.

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EBM+ in The Reasoner

The Reasoner is a monthly digest highlighting exciting new research on reasoning, inference and method broadly construed. It is interdisciplinary, covering research in, e.g., philosophy, logic, AI, statistics, cognitive science, law, psychology, mathematics and the sciences. In this month’s issue you can find a piece introducing EBM+ written by yours truly. In addition, future issues will keep readers updated with recent relevant developments with a column titled “What’s hot in EBM+”. So readers of this blog might want to keep checking in with The Reasoner from time to time.