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  • Essay / Cause-effect relationships in medicine

    My current plans for the future include an undergraduate major in neuroscience and then medical school. After that, I would like to complete my residency in neurosurgery. A career in this profession or at least in this general field is the only thing I see myself doing. It’s an extremely rewarding profession with many opportunities to help people. Watching people with cancer and other illnesses makes you want to do something, for example my mother had cancer. Experiences like this are truly eye-opening. The combination of that and my high school curriculum is what convinced me that this is what I should do with my life – science classes were the only ones in high school that I really enjoyed. In everyday life, logic is important and can be very useful, but it is of vital importance in the medical field. Cause and effect relationships are everywhere, but they are particularly evident in this profession. Knowing how to use these connections could make the job much easier or, more importantly, save someone's life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Causation is the first method to consider because it is the simplest method and is essential to understanding the rest of the methods. Cause is defined as a set of conditions that cause an effect. This effect can sometimes be desirable and sometimes extremely undesirable. The effect, however, depends a lot on the multiple variables that may be involved in the situation. For example, if your car is driving on a very icy road and it enters a ditch, most people would blame the icy road. However, if we start to consider other variables, falling into a ditch could be the result of faulty brakes or reckless driving. This applies just as effectively to the career I want. If you do surgery and cut some with a scalp, you could do a lot of damage. For this reason, if something goes wrong, it is generally considered the doctor's fault, but it could actually be due to the thickness of the tissue or one of many other variables, so if less pressure was applied to the thinner fabric, the same problem could occur. never happened. This network which takes into account all possible variables is called occasional network. As you can see in the examples, changing the different variables can result in many different results. So, by applying different amounts of pressure, you can determine the safe amount of pressure on a corpse before performing surgery. Besides all the necessary conditions for the situation, there are also many unnecessary conditions. Some unhelpful conditions include the time of day or the patient's personality traits. These are variables that must be eliminated to give you a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. The doctor with the scalpel is reported as the cause of establishing the normal state of a system. A normal state is found using historical information about an object. So in this case, the patient's brain was in its normal state before the scalpel penetrated it, because it was always like that in the past. Once the scalpel has stabbed the brain, it enters its abnormal state, which is a drastic change from an object's normal state. A change of state is a very common phenomenon. For example, a stone that breaksa window changes the window from a normal state to an abnormal state or when a patient contracts a disease it changes from a normal state to an abnormal state. To return to the idea of ​​cause, we add two new terms: precipitate. cause and distant cause. A triggering cause is the object or event directly involved in producing an effect. A remote cause is something that is linked to the initiating cause through a chain of events. In the case of the rock and the window, the triggering cause is the stone, but the remote cause could be the person who dared to hit the window. In surgery, any mistake would be mine, but a distant cause could be lack of sleep if someone kept me up all night. Being able to apply everything related to causality is a useful tool that can allow you to do your job faster and with fewer errors. John Stuart Mills further explored the concept of causality with his five methods of experimental inquiry, also known as the canons. The five methods are the agreement method, the difference method, the joint agreement and difference method, the residual method and the concomitant variation method. These five principles are what many people base their inductive causal arguments on. The agreement method looks at two or more instances of an event to see what they have in common. This can be used to illustrate someone's personal taste. Let's say you listen to a piccolo and don't like it, then you listen to a trombone and like it, then you listen to a cell and don't like it, then you like the French horn. From this set of conditions, we can conclude that the person in question likes brass instruments because that is what all the instruments they like have in common. In the medical field, multiple patients may arrive with the same illness and determining what they all have in common could be the key to curing their illness by finding the cause. For example, they may all have eaten the same foods, worked at the same place, or taken the same pills. By finding out what they all have in common, you can deduce the cause of the illness. However, this method is not conclusive because the three patients might have other commonalities that are overlooked. Maybe they could have eaten with dirty utensils. It is also possible that two different causes are causing the illness, and not the same thing – the same food – which they all have in common. Two of them might be taking the same pills and the third might be working with dangerous chemicals. In this case, both of these conditions can cause the disease, although the third condition is what they may all have in common. In cases like this, general information about the different conditions can be very helpful. This is why it is very important to collect the complete history of any new admitted patient. The difference method is similar to the agree method, but instead of finding instances of a common event, you find instances of an event. not in common. If a person drives a group of people to the hospital after getting food poisoning while eating at a restaurant, you can find out what they all ate, even the driver who doesn't have food poisoning. Suppose they all ate steak, vegetables, and red wine, and everyone except the person without food poisoning ate fries, you can conclude that the fries were the cause of the food poisoning. This is because you are looking for a single condition that was present when the effect occurred and was absent when the effect did not occur. This methodprovides a sufficient condition but is still not conclusive, as other possibilities could have been overlooked or neglected. The joint method of agreement and difference combines the method of agreement and the method of difference. If two or more instances of an event have only one thing in common, while the instances in which it does not occur all share the absence of that thing, then the item is a probable cause. This method could be very useful in surgery. If you are operating on a patient with a problem and you need to determine which of five different nerves is solving the problem. In this case, you would think of patients from the past with the same or similar problems. Then you could chart different patients from the past and determine which nerves, when impaired, resolved the problem and which nerves did not resolve the problem. From this table, you would look for people who had the same disease and which nerve could be used to solve the problem they all had in common. Then you search for all the people with other illnesses and see if all their illnesses could be cured by the nerve used to cure other people's illnesses. If such a case turns out to occur, you will know which nerve you need to manipulate to cure the condition. The joint has method is much more likely to be correct than if you use either of the first two methods alone. The joint method allows us to affirm that the nerve problem was a necessary condition for the disease, and not just sufficient. Mill's fourth canon is the method of residues, which subtracts from a complex set of events those parts which already have known causes. The theory is that what remains – the “residual” – is a likely cause of the remaining effect. This method is very effective in the medical field and that is why the medical history of the patient is taken into account. Say a patient comes in with a headache, vomiting and a rash, the first thing you would do would be to find out what they last ate. Let's say they ate a rare steak, fries, vegetables, cake, ice cream and coffee, you can use this list of foods and basic knowledge to determine which food caused which problem. If patients sometimes get headaches from ice, you can assume that the headache is coming from the ice. Then you may discover that the patient has never eaten cake before. With this finding, the best conclusion is probably that the patient is allergic to an ingredient in the cake, which is most likely causing the rash. Next, regarding the vomiting, among the list of foods the patient eats, the rare steak is likely the cause of the vomiting, as it may have been undercooked and caused food poisoning. This method is primarily based on inference but can still be a useful tool for determining what to test and how to test it. The fifth and final canon is the method of concomitant variations. This method looks for two factors that vary together. This essentially amounts to saying that if variation in one part of an event accompanies variation in another part of the event, then the two parts are probably related in a fortuitous way. To do this, we look for correlations – a match between two sets of objects, events, or sets of data. A good way to symbolize this would be to say that ABC occurs with XY Z. A ± BC gives X ± YZ, with the ± representing an offset. Therefore A and X are causally linked. In other words, let's say you are in a car and..