Trust me, I’m a doctor: a phenomenological account of epistemic privilege in the medical context

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have exposed epistemic injustices in the medical context that distort the clinical relationship and maintain power imbalances. While there has been a prominent focus on how this imbalance impacts those with diminished epistemic credibility, this is only one side of a delicate equilibrium. This paper explores the ways in which these epistemically unjust structures bestow a dynamic epistemic privilege on healthcare professionals. This privilege, far from being static or merely figurative, transforms the embodied subjectivity of the healthcare professional in this space, as well as how the world discloses itself to them. This epistemic privilege, in turn, has a broader impact on how illness is communicated and understood, both within and beyond the medical encounter. To draw out the obscured role of epistemic privilege in the medical context, this paper imbues the field of epistemic injustice with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of speech expression. This work should not only help ground a more complete understanding of the structures that sustain epistemic injustice, but also reveal its phenomenological influence on how healthcare professionals and patients, comparatively, relate to the self, the world and others.