Philosophy and Medicine

Abstract:

How can medical researchers generate reliable knowledge about treatment outcomes? The usual answer to this question is that randomised clinical trials are the best way of doing this. But there are many cases where doing a trial is not possible. In such cases, researchers must rely on other kinds of evidence. However, as is well-known, these kinds of evidence have many shortcomings, such as suffering from confounding and various species of bias. This talk uses methods drawn from the law to explore improved ways of working with imperfect evidence in medicine.