This conference was a vivid touchstone experience. I had heard Professors Roger Kerry & Stephen Mumford talk in London in November 2015 and was enthralled; this really was something else entirely.
At last an antidote to the prescriptive and bullying rhetoric that is Evidence Based Medicine (EBM). I had grown increasingly tired of – what some writers term – the ‘outrageously exclusionary’ and ‘dominant ideology’ that is EBM. I had Sackett’s words ‘we can not allow clinical practice to become tyrannised by evidence’ ringing in my ears since I had recently re-read his rather wonderful and seminal EBM paper (I remember it well: catching the bus on a Sunday – circa 1991 – so that I could photocopy this from the University library whilst working as a fledgling researcher in Southampton).
So that’s how I found myself at a CauseHealth project workshop in Oslo in January 2015, mixing it with Philosophers, Medics, Researchers and Vets (!) and here’s a few words I wrote for the CauseHealth blog…
“What singular question could be more pressing for clinicians today: how do we prepare the way for the return of the P-E-R-S-O-N in contemporary healthcare amidst rife healthcare commodification and the mechanical one-size-fits-all approach that is EBM? Well the CauseHealth project offers an alternative. My personal conference highlights were Roger Kerry and Matt Low but it was Anna Luise Kirkengen who stole the show; a force of nature indeed…
We must acknowledge that health, sickness and bodily functioning are interwoven with human meaning-production, fundamentally personal and biographical.
In clinics and hospitals the world-over, the narrative, the personal and the biographical P-E-R-S-O-N is often found bullied and threatened by this hegemony that is contemporary EBM; healthcare is de-personalised. This conference and the CauseHealth project have influenced my practice unlike any other I can recall; for those on the receiving-end of EBM machinations the CauseHealth project redresses the balance, can inspire and nourish the clinician and offers theoretical possibility and practical direction.