Abstracts

“Housing Security and Envisioning a ‘Culture of Health’: Lessons from the Pandemic”
Sean A. Valles — Michigan State University - Center for Bioethics and Social Justice
Wed. May 26th - 10:00 am ET

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the US, it quickly proved to be particularly deadly for the many people in the country who have no home, or whose housing was tenuous. Soon afterward, the economic impacts of the pandemic began creating new housing security problems as many workers were furloughed or laid off. When various government entities reacted by putting moratoriums on evictions, it inspired legal and ethical battles about the appropriate uses of public health emergency powers. I put this situation into the context of long-standing theoretical and practical debates in the field of population health, in which the emerging motto is that we need to create a “culture of health” across the whole of society, which includes health-conducive policies in aspects of our culture that might not usually get attention for their positive or negative impacts on health: housing policies, tax policies, working conditions, etc. What could or would housing security look like in a “culture of health” built in the wake of the pandemic?

“Still No Pill for Men? Values in Research on Male Birth Control”
Chris ChoGlueck — New Mexico Tech - Department of Communication, Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Wed. May 26th - 11:00 am ET

Double standards are widespread throughout biomedicine, especially in research on reproductive health. One of the clearest cases of double standards involves the feminine gendering of reproductive responsibility for contraception and the continued lack of highly effective, reversible methods for cisgender men. While the biomedical establishment accepts diversity and inclusion as important social values for clinical trials, their continued use of inequitable standards undermines their ability to challenge unfair social hierarchies by developing male contraception. Thus, the gender/sex bias present in contraceptive research raises the “New Demarcation Problem”: If we accept that values can and will play important roles in science, how can we nevertheless distinguish positive influences of values from more corrosive bias? I argue that biomedical researchers ought to aim their clinical trials at equity and utilize methodologies that actually achieve that aim. More specifically, I contend that we can avoid the problem of double standards by gender/sex in contraceptive research by utilizing more equitable standards. My proposed demarcation criterion has direct policy implications for institutions conducting, funding, and evaluating clinical trials. For contraceptive trials, this involves a shift in risk assessment from an individual model to a shared model for the couple.

"Misinformation During the COVID-19 Pandemic"
Cailin O’Connor — University of California, Irvine - Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science
Wed. May 26th - 1:00 pm ET

During the COVID-19 pandemic there have been several prominent mechanisms for the spread of false beliefs that fall outside our normal understanding of misinformation.  In this talk, I make use of network models to discuss two of these.  The first occurs in cases where plausible scientific claims turn out to be false, but spread widely and continue to influence policy nonetheless.  The second involves cases where new scientific claims become attached to political camps, thus preventing normal discourse about these claims.

“Negotiating Values in Clinical Guidelines: The Importance of Humility and Acumen"
Leah McClimans — University of South Carolina - Department of Philosophy
Thurs. May 27th - 10:00 am ET

Although clinical practice guidelines play multiple implicit roles, their explicit purpose is to improve quality of care and reduce practice variation amongst clinicians (Timmermans and Berg, 2003). Yet there is little evidence and significant skepticism regarding CPGs success in this regard. In this talk I discuss my experience with an intervention to improve the uptake of CPG recommendations. Indeed, I was the intervention (O’Toole, Murphy & McClimans, 2019). In the Autumn of 2018 I was seated as a full writing member of the National Cancer Control Programme (NCCP) in Ireland’s revision of their prostate cancer guideline. The NCCP uses the GRADE Evidence to Decision framework (EtD) and my job was to support the multidisciplinary group’s answers to the sections on “Harm and Benefit” and “Values and Preferences”. Drawing on specific questions within the guideline, I will discuss, on the one hand, the near ubiquity of epistemic and non-epistemic values that come to bear on these questions. On the other hand, I discuss the ethical and epistemic challenges of bringing these values to light, and the roles that humility and acumen play in overcoming (at least some of) them. 

“How to Measure Youth Mental Health Responsibly”
Eran Tal — McGill University - Department of Philosophy
Coauthors: Skye Barbic, Danielle Celone, Kyle Dewsnap, Sebastian Rodriguez Duque, Sophie Osiecki, and Darius Valevicius
Thurs. May 27th - 11:00 am ET

This paper reports early results from a new collaboration among philosophers of science, psychometricians, mental health clinicians, and young people. Our aim is to help healthcare service providers who screen and treat young people aged 12 to 24 years make responsible and informed use of patient-reported data obtained from psychometric questionnaires, such as the PHQ-9 depression questionnaire and the K-10 psychological distress scale. We describe some of the challenges facing youth mental health measurement in the clinical context, clarify how philosophy can help, and report on a pilot training we recently delivered to 23 youth mental health clinicians in British Columbia.

 

"The Legal Foundations of Postmortem Diagnosis in Late Medieval Milan"
Ann Carmichael — Indiana University, Bloomington - Department of History and Philosophy of Science & Medicine
Fri. May 28th - 10:00 am ET

Civic mortality registers from the later fifteenth-century Milan provide rare evidence to the causes of death in an urban context, making them especially useful in ongoing efforts to understand the dynamics of both epidemic and non-epidemic years in the late Middle Ages. It is thus tempting to view the registers within a public health framework. But the format of each death entry strongly suggests that these registers are best understood within a juridical tradition.  The activities and diagnoses of Health Office physicians and surgeons, especially Master Giovanni Catelano, reflect how medical knowledge was acquired before and after an individual’s death, but their extensive lived experience and empirical knowledge had little impact on learned medicine at that time. Meanwhile, the Milanese forged a distinctive forensic culture which insured a smoothly operating municipal public health office in all but the direst epidemic circumstances.

“Overlapping Disasters: Diabetes and the COVID-19 Pandemic”
Richard M. Mizelle, Jr. — University of Houston - Department of History
Fri. May 28th - 11:00 am ET

What happens when a sudden pandemic in SARS-Cov-2 meets an old metabolic disease in diabetes?  Diabetes is a disease we have been defining as epidemic for over 30 years, yet its presence does not, and perhaps never has elicited the societal fear and public health response of other diseases.  Yet diabetes and Covid-19 coincide with broader questions of poverty and inequality, housing insecurity, segregated neighborhoods, low wages, and lack of insurance.  These questions are not new and represent a continuation of the social issues informing the diabetes epidemic.  This talk briefly investigates multiple disasters for thinking about the public's health.