The Coproduction of Medical Knowledge

What is the relationship between experiential knowledge and the categories, etiologies, and treatment modalities of medical science? When do patients form social movements and demand participation in medical research? This article reviews trends in how medical anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and the history of medicine approach the coproduction of medical knowledge. Coproduction is used as a wide-ranging idiom to capture how knowledge building happens across social-material domains and as an aspirational vision for the ways that collaborative knowledge making can be intentional, improved on, and reimagined. I begin with an intellectual and social history of voluntary self-help organizations, patient advocacy movements, citizen science, lay expertise, and the era of intentionally patient-led research. I then offer thoughts about how abolition medicine and Indigenous science offer a radical vision for the coproduction of medical knowledge, especially in an era of antiscience, when strong political forces threaten public well-being.