Hello!
I’m Austin, and I like to think about epistemic, social, and ethical issues in the overlaps of research and practice in science – especially clinical medicine.
I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, where I worked on how we define and discover medical side effects. My doctoral work argued for a novel account of ‘side effect’ that ameliorated conceptual and practical issues with definitions given by the FDA, CDC, and WHO. I argued that side effects are different than other effects like adverse reactions, adverse events, and placebo effects in terms of the intention of patients and the causal capacities of drugs. I looked at the side effect discovery process and showed how post-market drug research trials can complicate commonplace philosophical assumptions about ‘exploratory experimentation’. I highlighted how preferences and aversions to certain kinds of evidence in ‘evidence-based medicine’ underlie cases of failed side effect reporting by clinicians. Finally, in considering how patients can be involved in reporting side effect data, I offered a bioethical, social-epistemic, and pragmatic framework to guide future proposals.
My ongoing research continues to look at side effects but also branches into conceptual and ethical issues with psychiatry, genomic medicine, patient and public inclusion in science and medicine or ‘citizen science’, agriculture and regulating novel technology, conflicts of interest and privatized science, and the role of values in science. I am primarily trained as a philosopher of science, but I have graduate education in history, public health, and health services research. I hold interdisciplinary degrees in history and history and philosophy of science (HPS) and I am committed to a practice-informed, problem-centric approach to social, ethical, and epistemic issues in contemporary medical practice.
You can reach me @ austinjdue@gmail.com or via Twitter