Why do patients consistently report feeling ignored, dismissed or not taken seriously within healthcare contexts?

Why is it so often difficult to get people to take seriously one's accounts of the experience of illness and impacts upon one’s life? Why do patients, activists and healthcare policymakers find it so natural to use a vocabulary of “silencing”, of voices being “erased” and patient perspectives being ignored?

In this event, three philosophers of illness will address these questions using the concept of an epistemic injustice. We ask if there is a distinctive kind of injustice that affects our abilities to gain and share knowledge, information, and experiences. We will discuss what epistemic injustices are and how they arise, why persons with illnesses might be particularly susceptible to them, and ask what, if anything, could be done to try to rectify these injustices. It will turn out that these issues are extremely complicated. Thinking about epistemic injustices in relation to illness involves all sorts of complicated, often confusing concepts such as lived experience, patient autonomy, and awkward questions about the relationships between a person’s own embodied self-understanding and the expert by a medical knowledge of healthcare practitioners.

Ian James Kidd, Ellie Byrne, and Havi Carel are all philosophers of illness working on EPIC: Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare, a six-year Wellcome-funded interdisciplinary research project. Between them, they have expertise in philosophy of science, psychiatry, and medicine, phenomenology of illness, emotion and narrative, grief and loss, and social epistemology.

EPIC Website: epistemicinjusticeinhealthcareproject.blogspot.com`