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Stephen Senn
Head of Competence Center
for Methodology and Statistics (CCMS)
Luxembourg Institute of Health
Twitter @stephensenn
Evidence Based or Person-centred? A statistical debate
It was hearing Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum (RLA) in January 2017 speaking at the Epistemology of Causal Inference in Pharmacology conference in Munich organised by Jürgen Landes, Barbara Osmani and Roland Poellinger, that inspired me to buy their book, Causation A Very Short Introduction[1]. Although I do not agree with all that is said in it and also could not pretend to understand all it says, I can recommend it highly as an interesting introduction to issues in causality, some of which will be familiar to statisticians but some not at all.
Since I have a long-standing interest in researching into ways of delivering personalised medicine, I was interested to see a reference on Twitter to a piece by RLA, Evidence based or person centered? An ontological debate, in which she claims that the choice between evidence based or person-centred medicine is ultimately ontological[2]. I don’t dispute that thinking about health care delivery in ontological terms might be interesting. However, I do dispute that there is any meaningful choice between evidence based medicine (EBM) and person centred healthcare (PCH). To suggest so is to commit a category mistake by suggesting that means are alternatives to ends.
In fact, EBM will be essential to delivering effective PCH, as I shall now explain. Continue reading
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