Misunderstanding Epistemic Injustice: The Case of Chronic Pain Reports

This article critiques the broad interpretation of inadequate medical responses to chronic pain reports as instances of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice. While Miranda Fricker's concepts help highlight the neglect of chronic pain sufferers – such as healthcare professionals' failure to take reports seriously (testimonial injustice) or the lack of adequate language to communicate pain experiences (hermeneutical injustice) – we argue that applying these frameworks overlooks important nuances. Specifically, we contend that there is an additional, distinct epistemic failure in how healthcare providers engage with chronic pain complaints: a failure to respond to these reports in adequate ways, beyond merely understanding or believing them. We hypothesize that it has to do with inquisitive inertia (a decision not to investigate further, in the absence of good medical reasons to ground such a decision), and we conceptualize this failure in terms of distributive epistemic injustice, that may persist even in the absence of testimonial or hermeneutical injustices as they are traditionally understood.