ABSTRACT
Epidemiologists have achieved their textbook goal, to identify causes of illness. However, this is not because of any epistemological technique to extract causal information from observational data. Etiological explanation (EE) integrates causal, causal-mechanical, and mechanistic explanations as reviewed by D. Benjamin Barros: The literature thus includes several types of accounts of explanation that incorporate causal concepts. This EE needs to be supplemented with additional characteristics if it is to be granted the status of good EE. In epidemiology and medicine, the goal is to do something about illness occurrence in order to reduce the illness-associated burden to individuals and populations, respectively. The main reason to propose the concept of explanation by intervention is that the successful prevention of illness is the ultimate accomplishment in public health. Etiological explanation based on results from laboratory, epidemiology, and interventional trials is arguably more robust than evidence based on results from the lab and from observational epidemiology alone.
