Postdoctoral Fellow | Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College
tiina [dot] rosenqvist [at] gmail [dot] com
Research Project #2:
(Chronic) Pain, Credibility,
and Clinical Practice
One key aspect of my research focuses on pain and suffering, with an emphasis on testimonial exchanges surrounding pain.
Chronic pain, normally defined as pain lasting for three months or longer, is a public health challenge, a leading cause of disability, and a source of considerable emotional distress for many people. Despite meaningful efforts to reduce the burden of pain and tackle the challenges in its treatment, many chronic pain patients continue to report dissatisfaction with the care they receive. A commonly reported issue is "credibility deficits" in clinical contexts: chronic pain patients often feel that their pain testimony is unfairly doubted or dismissed by doctors and other clinicians.
My goal is to contribute to the improved quality of care for individuals with persistent pain using the tools and methods of philosophy. The project combines philosophy of science, social epistemology, phenomenology, medical ethics, and conceptual engineering to achieve this aim.
The memes below highlight why this work is necessary:
Papers in Progress
Women's Pain and Psychogenic Diagnoses (with Sara Purinton)
Healthcare providers often rely on the following sort of concerning reasoning when encountering patients with difficult-to-diagnose symptoms: in the absence of evidence for a physical cause, the symptoms are presumed to be psychological in origin (O’Leary 2018). In this paper, we take up this concern in the context of chronic pain, with particular attention to how such reasoning disproportionately affects women. We first examine the unwarranted inference from diagnostic uncertainty to psychogenic diagnosis and explore how identity prejudice and diagnostic uncertainty interact in clinical practice. We then consider additional contributors to diagnostic uncertainty: gendered research gaps and male-centered diagnostic paradigms. After outlining the harms associated with psychogenic diagnoses, we consider the objection that such diagnoses might be pragmatically justified. Finally, we conclude by cautioning against using psychogenic diagnoses and call for a more nuanced approach to diagnosing and treating chronic pain.
