The CauseHealth Series: Chapter 9 - Causality and Dispositionality in Medical Practice with Prof. Ivor Ralph Edwards

The Words Matter Podcast with Oliver Thomson

Welcome to another episode of The Words Matter Podcast.

In this episode of the CauseHealth Series I'm speaking with Professor Ivor Ralph Edwards about his Chapter 9 of the CauseHealth book (download for FREE here) titled Causality and Dispositionality in Medical Practice (read his chapter here). Ralph is Professor of Medicine and Senior Advisor (and Former Director) at the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, the WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring.

He has worked in clinical toxicology in the fields of drug abuse, acute and chronic poisoning, toxicity from industrial chemicals as well as adverse drug reactions. He now works on medical and legal aspects of causality evaluation, as well as issues of risk and benefit evaluation and data mining approaches to support signal detection and evaluation.

In this episode we talk about:

• Ralph’s view of causation early in his career as a medical career.
• His role in leading the global work to improve clinical reporting on possible side-effects.
• We talk about how when working on medicine safety globally, he sees that different dispositions in different population groups affect how they response to medicines.
• Ralph gives us examples from his own clinical work where some of the dispositionalist features of causality have been important.
• We discuss the time it takes for a causal story to emerge.
• Finally we discuss the problem of relying too much on quantitative evidence and statistics to measure and standardise medical practice and treatments.

It was pleasure speaking with Ralph. He has a vast and varied experience in medicine, and it was great to hear the role that causal dispositionalism has played in his work. His many anecdotes, great sense of humour and a voice for a podcasting, made the conversation all the more enjoyable.

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