Erin and Robert, thank you both for raising this question. Your discussion sent me back to Pearl’s (2009) Causality, 2ed. §6.5.3 “Exchangeability versus Structural Analysis of Confounding,” and from there to Greenland & Robins (1986) — the prequel to Robert’s citation [3] above.
The latter piece opens up with the observation,
To our knowledge, no one has presented a theory of epidemiological confounding
based on a model for individual effects—a somewhat surprising state of affairs,
since a theory of synergy and antagonism has been derived from such models.
Greenland & Robins then proceed to develop a concrete exploration of identifiability, exchangeability and confounding, initially in the context of a single person. (Only after the first 1.5 pages does the setting expand to the population level.) I would hope clinicians could find this type of development immediately accessible by mapping it to the type of thinking (e.g., diagnostic) they employ in the patient encounter.
Incidentally, you may be interested to learn—as I did only recently—that James Robins’s inspiration came out of his experience as a physician (Richardson & Rotnitzky 2014).