The Limits of "Epistemic Injustice" in the Clinic
Sick people often report frustration about their encounters with doctors: they report not being listened to, not being taken seriously, not being able to successfully communicate their issues, not getting answers to their questions, and more. In 2014, Havi Carel and Ian James Kidd published a paper where they analysed this phenomenon in terms of epistemic injustice. This paper has been enormously influential, to the point where it has become the main lens through which patient frustrations with their doctors is analysed today. In this blog post, I want to highlight some of the limits of this approach. The notion was introduced by Miranda Fricker in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice . She defines epistemic injustice as a form of injustice that affects the subject “specifically in their capacity as a knower”. This is somewhat obscure, but the two subtypes of epistemic injustice that she defines help shed some light on the phenomenon she's trying to elucidate. Firstly, she discusses