Disease is everywhere. Everyone experiences disease, everyone knows somebody who is, or has been diseased, and disease-related stories hit the headlines on a regular basis. Many important issues in the philosophy of disease, however, have received remarkably little attention from philosophical thinkers.
This book examines a number of important debates in the philosophy of medicine, including ‘what is disease?’, and the roles and viability of concepts of causation, in clinical medicine and epidemiology. Where much of the existing literature targets conceptual analyses of health and disease, this book provides the reader with an insight into these debates, and develops plausible alternative accounts. The author explores a range of related subjects, discussing a host of interesting philosophical questions within clinical medicine, pathology and epidemiology. In the second part of the book, the author examines the concepts of causation employed by clinicians and pathologists, how one should classify diseases, and whether the epidemiologist’s models for inferring the causes of disease are all they’re cracked up to be.
Table of Content
AcknowledgementsList of abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Concept of Disease in Clinical Medicine
The maximally value laden conception – Rachel Cooper on disease
The pure statistical conception
The frequency and negative consequences approach, and the line-drawing problem
The etiological account of function, and disease as harmful dysfunction
Disease as harmful function – ‘drawing the line’ on the etiological account of disease
2. What is a Pathological Condition?
Boorse’s naturalism
Objections to Boorse’s naturalism
The frequency and negative consequences approach revisited
The etiological theory of pathological condition
3. Concepts of Causation in the Philosophy of Disease
Causation as counterfactual dependence
Clinical medicine and the dispositional account of causation
The classification of diseases, and the sufficient-cause model of causation
4. Causal Inference in Public Health
Hill’s criteria and the evidence-based medicine evidence hierarchy
The epidemiologist’s potential outcomes approach
Hernan and Taubman’s potential outcomes approach
Diffusing Broadbent – a Popperian take on the potential outcomes approach
The importance of nonmanipulable causes
5. Concluding Remarks
About the author
Benjamin Smart was awarded his Ph D by the University of Nottingham, UK, in 2012, before lecturing for two years at the University of Birmingham, UK. He joined the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2014 as a Senior Research Associate, where he now works as a Senior Lecturer.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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