Why should patients participate in research?

User participation was introduced as a key public instrument in Report no. 41 (1987 – 88) to the Storting, Health policy towards the year 2000: National health plan. The health policy goals included increased democratisation, user empowerment and legal safeguards. Questions regarding how services could be developed to meet patients with respect and empathy were highlighted, giving rise to a need to collect user experiences. In turn, this helped acknowledge user experiences as valuable knowledge for the health services, and included the patients’ subjective knowledge, their perspectives and perceptions of reality. In medical and health research, this may help supplement the perspectives of clinicians and researchers. This has led to new forms of knowledge production: participantbased research, user-involving research, co-research, collaborative research, usercontrolled research. Instead of undertaking research on or about patients, research is undertaken jointly with them (1). We feel, however, that there is a need to discuss what this kind of knowledge production implies at the level of philosophy of science. By way of an introduction, we will therefore elucidate some viewpoints regarding where and how such knowledge is produced. We will then proceed to discuss how user participation may affect knowledge production.