Epistemic Justice in Medical Authority

Sor Juana challenged the monopoly of institutional authority over truth and knowledge, insisting that women too could think, observe, and understand. In contemporary medicine, patients with chronic illness frequently experience epistemic injustice: their lived experience is subordinated to clinical observation, their pain reports are doubted, their self-knowledge is overridden by expert pronouncement. This concept, rooted in Sor Juana's demand for intellectual credibility, asks: whose knowledge counts? You have spent years—perhaps decades—living with your illness. You understand its patterns, your body's language, what helps and what harms. This experiential expertise is valid and necessary knowledge. Epistemic justice means insisting that your testimony about your own experience carries weight, that you are a knower, not merely a subject of knowledge. It means building alliances with practitioners who recognize the legitimacy of your understanding and refusing those who dismiss it.