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37Mechanistic reasoning and informed consentBioethics 33 (1): 162-168. 2018.Evidence‐based medicine (EBM) proponents have argued that mechanistic evidence concerning medical treatments should be considered secondary to evidence derived from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). One common criticism of RCTs is that they often do not yield results that are generalizable to clinical practice, and that for clinical practice application, mechanistic evidence is needed. However, proponents of EBM have argued that mechanistic reasoning is often unreliable and thus not very usef…Read more
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56Research gaps in the philosophy of evidence‐based medicinePhilosophy Compass 11 (11): 757-771. 2016.Increasing philosophical attention is being directed to the rapidly growing discipline of evidence-based medicine. Philosophical discussions of EBM, however, remain narrowly focused on randomization, mechanisms, and the sociology of EBM. Other aspects of EBM have been all but ignored, including the nature of clinical reasoning and the question of whether it can be standardized; the application of EBM principles to the logic, value, and ethics of diagnosis and prognosis; evidence synthesis ; and …Read more
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Medical decision making : diagnosis, treatment, and prognosisIn Miriam Solomon, Jeremy R. Simon & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine, Routledge. 2016.
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28Diagnostic Justice: Testing for Covid-19European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (2). 2021.Diagnostic testing can be used for many purposes, including testing to facilitate the clinical care of individual patients, testing as an inclusion criterion for clinical trial participation, and both passive and active surveillance testing of the general population in order to facilitate public health outcomes, such as the containment or mitigation of an infectious disease. As such, diagnostic testing presents us with ethical questions that are, in part, already addressed in the literature on c…Read more
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74Explaining with Models: The Role of IdealizationsInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29 (4): 383-392. 2015.Because they contain idealizations, scientific models are often considered to be misrepresentations of their target systems. An important question is therefore how models can explain the behaviours of these systems. Most of the answers to this question are representationalist in nature. Proponents of this view are generally committed to the claim that models are explanatory if they represent their target systems to some degree of accuracy; in other words, they try to determine the conditions und…Read more
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34Understanding child labor in MyanmarJournal of Global Ethics 15 (3): 202-212. 2019.ABSTRACTThe problem of child labor is worse in Myanmar than nearly anywhere else in the world. Moreover, unlike in many other countries where this practice occurs, in Myanmar, child labor is conduc...
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28Shadow Medicine: The Placebo in Conventional and Alternative Therapies by John S. Haller JrKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 29 (2): 1-3. 2019.Placebos are much discussed in both the medical and philosophy of medicine literatures. Once narrowly defined as inert “sugar pills,”, they now are now most often taken to be “treatments that appear similar to experimental treatments, but that lack their characteristic components”. In addition to their use in the control groups of many clinical trials, placebos are also now widely recognized by medical practitioners to be powerful therapies in themselves, often outperforming conventional drug th…Read more
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44Causal Explanatory Pluralism and Medically Unexplained Physical SymptomsJournal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. 2014.
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64Differential Diagnosis and the Suspension of JudgmentJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 38 (5): 487-500. 2013.In this paper I argue that ethics and evidence are intricately intertwined within the clinical practice of differential diagnosis. Too often, when a disease is difficult to diagnose, a physician will dismiss it as being “not real” or “all in the patient’s head.” This is both an ethical and an evidential problem. In the paper my aim is two-fold. First, via the examination of two case studies (late-stage Lyme disease and Addison’s disease), I try to elucidate why this kind of dismissal takes place…Read more
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41Mathematics and Scientific RepresentationInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 27 (1). 2013.No abstract
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67Ageing gametes and embryonic death: a response to BovensJournal of Medical Ethics 37 (9): 571-572. 2011.Luc Bovens, in his 2006 article, argues that it can be shown that the ‘rhythm' method of birth control results in a larger number of embryonic deaths than the IUD, the morning after pill or the combination oral contraceptive pill, just so long as one accepts his three ‘plausible’ assumptions. In this brief response I will argue that Boven's third assumption is not plausible when one takes into account a basic knowledge of human reproductive biology. Thus, his argument, in both of its possible re…Read more
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71A non representationalist view of model explanationStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43 (2): 326-332. 2012.