Paper short abstract:

This workshop aims to explore and extend the basic epistemic concepts of knowledge creation and interpretation in EBM and guideline development using the concept of 'mindlines'.

Paper long abstract:

While frequency reasoning in EBM is taken for granted, multi-morbidity, over-diagnosis and person centred medicine prove to be challenging. In order to cope with this, the Guideline International Network (G-I-N, a collaboration of NICE and other guideline developing institutions) started to explore how to appraise and include other types of knowledge. Many more types of reasoning appear to occur during guideline development processes. These could be important as they may help to develop guidelines when there is no clear frequency of events, for instance in rare diseases, complex interventions in social care or prediction in the single case scenario of a patient in everyday practice.

A better understanding of the epistemological assumptions that underlie medical knowledge creation is urgently needed. Using a more advanced perspective on knowledge in the form of Gabbay and Le May's mindlines (collectively shared, largely tacit knowledge influenced by past personal experience and interaction with others) and Lonergan's interpretation model (observation, interpretation, judgment and deliberation), we set up an international research study at the Universities of Oxford and Oslo.

We invite you to this workshop to help explore and solve these epistemological issues as part of this research. We want to discuss with you what it is that EBM tries to accomplish, how to increase our knowledge base as efficiently as possible and how to improve our inductive inferences to benefit healthcare for patients when there is no frequency of events.