Resumo

PALENCIA SANCHEZ, Francisco. The search for causal relationships: the challenge of the daily practice of an epidemiologist. Revista médica Risaralda [online]. 2012, vol.18, n.2, pp.165-171. ISSN 0122-0667.

The search for causes has been a constant in the history of human kind, from our earliest ancestor until today, knowing the answer to why about the different phenomena that could affect the human race has been a priority and therefore have had several approaches, the magical and religious perspective to the scientific view. Mainly the scientific view of the process causes and effect beginning with the Greek philosophers who started a methodical and rational way to answer the causes of the things, that influenced since the all kind the science because the philosophy hold all the scientific knowledge even the health science so the medicine would not stay out from this influence, that it begun introduce by Hippocrates who is one of the father of western medicine, on his work he tried to make causal association between the disease and exposures. This paper analyzes how has been applied the concept of causality on biomedical science and its usefulness in finding the causes within the framework of the health and disease process will be reviewed specifically the contributions of philosophy of science and the statistic on the build of the epistemology of epidemiology and how has been the evolution of this structure and know how this development is essential to understanding one of the major targets of epidemiology such as establishing the causes of the diseases.

Palavras-chave : epidemiology; causality; philosophy; knowledge.

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