This book is intended as an intellectual resource for clinicians and healthcare professionals who are interested in digging deeper into the philosophical foundations of their daily practice. It is a tool for understanding some of the philosophical motivations and rationality behind the way medicine and healthcare are studied, evaluated and practiced. In particular, this book illustrates the impact that our thinking about causality, both philosophically and conceptually, has on the clinical encounter. The aim is to engage and empower healthcare professionals to take part in changing and defining the premises for their own practice. After all, if clinical decisions should be based on evidence, this ought to be evidence that is relevant and well-suited for the clinic. The book has two parts, Philosophical Framework and Application to the Clinic. The first part is written from the philosophical perspective and presents a singular overall framework. The second part is written primarily by clinicians who address some implications of the philosophical framework for different aspects of their own practice.

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From the philosophical perspective presented in the first part of this book, together with the clinical application of this framework in the second part, it follows that we must change the way we approach causal evidence of health and illness conceptually, methodologically and practically. This has some practical consequences for the clinical encounter, as discussed throughout the book. We here offer some specific CauseHealth recommendations for making causal evidence more clinically relevant and better informed by the clinical encounter. The recommendations follow from an overall consideration of the previous chapters, both the philosophical framework and its clinical implications.

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In Oxford, UK, on the 3rd and 4th of October 2017, the CauseHealth group held a conference to tackle what they called “guidelines challenges.” New approaches to evidence and medical knowledge, as well as how to use that knowledge in practice, present specific challenges for current evidence‐based methods for developing and implementing guidelines. Because the conference aimed to produce both theoretical and practical proposals for solutions to these challenges, it was titled “The guidelines challenge—Philosophy, practice, policy,” and speakers from diverse disciplines and professions were invited to speak and attend.@en