Philosophic Perspectives: Community,Communications,and Occupational Disease Causation

Abstract

The caste in which workers and occupational health practitioners find themselves is plagued by intertwined but separable conflicts. A Cartesian model of causation, useful in the demonologies of regulation and toxic torts, is not heuristic in the revisions of health care, worker's compensation, and disability systems, nor in the prevention of violence in the workplace. Outside the caste, science progresses beyond mind-body bifurcations, the adverse effects of which are magnified within the caste. An argument is made for an ecological concept of causation, drawn from Darwin's community approach to the web of causal factors in both cultural and biological evolution, subsequently stimulated and developed by G. H. Mead and by biologically oriented and sociologically oriented human ecologists for application in the workplace. The ecological model is found in occupational biomedicine as practiced by leaders as diverse as Tichauer and Selikoff. The model integrates environmental, lifestyle, and genetic vectors in a community system bonded by communication and embracing a view of work unbifurcated from other activities.

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