By Keith Meadows and Matt Reaney For many years psychologists and other social scientists have been pushing for the individual patient’s perspective – priorities, needs, feelings and functioning – to be incorporated into drug development. This is usually achieved through the use of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) in clinical trials. The development and use of PROMs situates them at the vertex of two very different trends in medicine: patient-centred care and standardization. Indeed the application of PROMs – which pull in the direction of standardisation – results in a narrow concept ..read more

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Perspectives on Physiotherapy The allegory of the cave is a famous passage in the history of philosophy. It is a short excerpt from the beginning of Plato’s book, The Republic (1). There are a number of different interpretations of the allegory, but the one that I would like to present is within the context of education, specifically knowledge translation and the content, style and manner of its delivery. I would like to conclude with relating this to how we, as health care professionals, present knowledge within a professional dialogue. Plato’s Cave Imagine a group of prisoners who hav ..read more

by Rolf Sundet Rolf is Specialist in clinical psychology and Professor Emeritus, University of South-Eastern Norway, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, Department of Health, Social and Welfare Studies, Centre for Mental Health and Substance Abuse. In June 1972 I got off the bus outside the village of Lier, Norway, slowly walking towards the regional mental hospital. I was 18 years old with both anxiety and tense expectation about this new experience; working as a nursing assistant in a mental hospital. I was received by the nursing principal who informed me that I was to work on Ward 2 ..read more

Brian Broom, immunologist, psychotherapist and CauseHealth senior advisor Most Western clinicians who pursue a person-centred approach to physical illness experience significant resistance from colleagues and health institutions. At first glance this may seem strange. Wouldn’t everybody want to be person-centred and oriented to the unique patient? Isn’t it obvious that the appearance and development of disease is commonly multi-causal and multidimensional? Surely anyone can see that disease is a manifestation or representation within, and of, the ‘whole’, whether that ‘whole’ is the presenting ..read more

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As you might have noticed, CauseHealth has joined forces with Oliver Thomson and his Words Matter podcast! As an introduction to our book for new readers – or as an extra resource for old readers – we wanted to have one podcast episodes for each book chapter, where Oliver interviews the author(s) of that chapter. It is going really well, and we have now covered all of Part 1, setting up the philosophical framework of dispositionalism, and are now moving on to Part 2, of clinical applications, showing how that framework can be used in practice. Today, episode 7 was released, where Christine Pr ..read more

“Inspired by the Words Matter podcast’s Cause Health Series, Bill Taylor and Evie Martin discuss their reactions to the ideas presented in the podcast. They discuss how they think the biopsychosocial model has influenced physiotherapy practice for better or worse, and how we can “move beyond” it in clinic, as suggested by the Cause Health project.” Read more and watch the video chat on the Get Better website ..read more

The video chat was recorded by Stephen King, co-founder of Vocal Health Education, and appears in the second tier qualification they offer; The Vocal Health Practitioner. Watch the video on physical therapist Walt Fritz‘s website, Foundations in Manual Therapy – Science Informed Manual Therapy Education, where he also offers a range of educational resources on patient centred manual care ..read more

It is the business of pharmacovigilance to evidence causal failure: when the effects of the drugs are unexpected. Simply knowing that a medicine can affect or interact with a particular biological mechanism is itself a valuable piece of causal information, argue Elena Rocca, Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford in a recent publication. Read more about this and the CauseHealth collaboration with Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) in Uppsala Reports ..read more