Epistemic Injustice and Medical Diagnosis

In this contribution, I will be focusing on a particular aspect of epistemic injustice in the sense articulated by Miranda Fricker: the fact that ill women are more exposed than ill men to the experience of not being heard from doctors or health professionals. My aim is to show that epistemic injustice in medical diagnosis constitutes a form of silencing that prevents women from being able to efficiently communicate knowledge to others, and it is related to mechanisms that make doctors fail to recognize female patients as trustworthy and competent with respect to their illness conditions or to readily incorporate their knowledge into decision-making. More precisely, the paper is divided in two parts. In the first part, I present Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice. In the second, I discus some patient reports of cardiovascular disease as example of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice.