Dear Cambridge philosophers of science, Tomorrow, 31 January, is the first meeting of CamPoS for Lent, as usual at 1 p.m. in the HPS department in seminar room 2 in the basement. Bennett Holman of Yonsei University will be speaking on ‘Dr. Watson: The Impending Automation of Medical Diagnosis and Treatment’. An abstract is below.
Sincerely, J. Brian Pitts Abstract: Recent advancements in patient-networking and patient advocacy are beginning to have dramatic impacts on the regulation of drugs. While patient empowerment is typically portrayed positively, the advent of online networking sites such as “Patients Like Me” have allowed patients to coordinate with each other in ways that rarely possible in the past. Irrespective of what ones view on this movement, I will argue that it is descriptive fact that the modern regime of regulating drugs relies on passive or at least cooperative study participants. I will show through a case study of ALS treatments how patient activists have used online networking sites to unblind themselves of their trial group assignment and thus undermine the use of double-blind RCTs as a means to establish efficacy. However, new developments on the horizon of medicine offer a new alternative to this (I claim doomed) regime. -- J. Brian Pitts Senior Research Associate Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge jb...@cam.ac.uk Ph.D., Philosophy/History & Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame Ph.D., Physics, University of Texas at Austin _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
