Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2009; all rights reserved.
Commentary: Gilding the black box
Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
E-mail: jay.kaufman@mcgill.ca
Accepted 23 February 2009
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Most epidemiology textbooks have the obligatory passage on ‘what is a cause?’ These discussions often start with Hume, pass reverently through Bradford-Hill and (if the book is of relatively recent vintage) end with Pearl. But as Hafeman and Schwartz1 point out in their essay, few texts in our field go on to the question that really motivates these authors, which is ‘what is a causal structure?’ The closest thing I can find on my own bookcase might be Mervyn Susser's2 ‘Causal Thinking in the Health Sciences’, now more than 35 years old and long out of print.
Despite the generally simplistic approach taken by our textbooks, the big breakthrough stories in biomedical research often sound like a sportscaster narrating the progress of a pinball machine game: ‘First the ball hits a lever, than bounces into a hole, where it triggers a sensor that opens a chute, and the ball slides
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  D. M. Hafeman "Proportion Explained": A Causal Interpretation for Standard Measures of Indirect Effect? Am. J. Epidemiol., December 1, 2009; 170(11): 1443 - 1448. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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 S. Schwartz, D. Hafeman, U. Campbell, and N. Gatto Author's Response Int. J. Epidemiol., November 3, 2009; (2009) dyp323v1. [Full Text] [PDF]
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