Commentary: Rethinking epidemiology

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Abstract
It is time, we are told, to rethink epidemiology. It is time to rethink our quest, our concepts, and the nature and origin of our commitments. That is a lot of thinking, stretching across the broad landscape of our professional practice. Even our metaphors—this blind quest for the Philosopher's Stone1—should be rethought, as well as our concept of cause, our much-maligned criteria of causation, our signature methods, and, it seems, our philosophical foundations. It is time, we are told, to step away from all that is associated with the natural laboratory of observational science, once the source of so many successes but now fraught with ‘profound and fundamental problems’, to use the precise language of Drs Buchanan, Weiss, and Fullerton.
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