Little M
Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, Department of Surgery, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Soc Sci Med. 1998 Nov;47(9):1135-45. doi: 10.1016/s0277-9536(98)00185-3.
Epidemiology works in a public domain, gathering the results of surveys and trials into forms of knowledge which are made available to many stakeholders. Health policy makers, lawyers, the media, medical technology companies, and those who use and deliver health services all have legitimate interests in epidemiology. There is unfortunately no common language in which each of these stakeholders can express their interest in the outcomes of epidemiological studies. The largest and most important gap exists between those who use computational data and those who use cultural and linguistic models to generate their explanations. Methods have been described, however, which allow the identification of all legitimate stakeholders before epidemiological studies are undertaken. Identifying the stakeholders, however, will serve no purpose unless there is a prior commitment by epidemiologists to respect both reductionist and narrative accounts of truth.
流行病学在公共领域发挥作用，将调查和试验结果整理成可供众多利益相关者获取的知识形式。卫生政策制定者、律师、媒体、医疗技术公司以及使用和提供卫生服务的人员都对流行病学有着合理的兴趣。不幸的是，这些利益相关者中没有一种通用语言来表达他们对流行病学研究结果的兴趣。在使用计算数据的人和使用文化及语言模型来进行解释的人之间存在着最大且最重要的差距。然而，已经描述了一些方法，这些方法可以在进行流行病学研究之前识别所有合法的利益相关者。然而，除非流行病学家事先承诺尊重对真理的还原论和叙述性解释，否则识别利益相关者将毫无意义。
