Chronic pain, credibility, and clinical practice

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(with Vasia Barka)

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Abstract Chronic pain is a public health challenge, a leading cause of disability, and a source of significant suffering for a large percentage of the world’s population. Many chronic pain patients report that their pain testimonies are unfairly doubted and dismissed in clinical contexts, especially if their pain presents with an unknown etiology. We focus on two key sources of these “credibility deficits.” The first is identity prejudice, a well-recognized source of credibility deficits in general. The second—clinicians’ misconceptions about pain—has received less attention in the social epistemology of medicine. We discuss how identity prejudice and misconceptions about pain might interact and bolster one another in real-world clinical settings and argue that a genuinely patient-centered approach to medicine needs to tackle both. We then discuss how our insights might generalize to credibility deficits in other contexts.