ABSTRACT
In his refl ections on the emergence of the fi gure of the “lay expert” in medical sociology, more than ten years ago, Lindsay Prior was quite skeptical about the reliability of patients’ experiential knowledge when it comes to dealing with complex medical issues:
Lay people … often have detailed knowledge of other people as well as of themselves …, and intimate knowledge about the circumstances in which they live …. And all in all, they are experts by virtue of “having experience”. Yet, experience on its own is rarely suffi cient to understand the technical complexities of disease causation, its consequences or its management. This is partly because experiential knowledge is invariably limited, and idiosyncratic. It generates knowledge about the one instance, the one case, the single “candidate” …. Above all, lay people can be wrong .
