The CauseHealth Series Chapter 13: Causal Dispositionalism and Evidence Based Healthcare with Dr Roger Kerry

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 Dr Roger Kerry about his Chapter 13 that he wrote for the CauseHealth book titled ‘Causal Dispositionalism and Evidence Based Healthcare’ (read Roger's Chapter here).

Roger is an Associate Professor in the Division of Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Nottingham. He specialises on risks and adverse events of manual therapy, neck pain and headache as well as clinical reasoning (see his research here). He holds a PhD in Philosophy with the doctoral dissertation Causation and Evidence-Based Medicine (see here).

On this episode we talk about:

• His background as a physiotherapist, educator and researcher and how causation has featured in these areas of his work.
• The development of CauseHealth of which he was a founding member of the network.
• Roger’s Philosophy PhD which looked at causation in relation to EBM and how this related the CauseHealth project.
• The inferential gap or problem of induction
• The nature of clinical reasoning and clinical expertise.
• What is the ‘best available evidence’ in relation to causal dispositionalism.
• Whether there is objective ‘Truth’ in healthcare.
• What we ‘do’ with RCTs, and what does dispositionalim do with/say about RCTs and how the theory may change or support our clinical and research methods.

So this was an absolutely wonderful discussion with Roger, I’d been wanting to have him on the Podcast for ages- and it was well worth the wait. You'll hear him say at the end of our chat that it was like going three rounds with Mike Tyson…but the feeling was completely mutual given the ground that we both covered in the conversation. This is a real treat.

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