It’s impossible to falsify patient reports of pain, yet the medical field takes them quite seriously.

That's not true. For example, if someone suddenly stops acting like they are in pain when they think they are not being observed that's a pretty good indication that they are faking it.

The medical field will often ignore out of hand any reports of pain as drug seeking and do nothing about it.

I have first hand experience with this.

Well, to go recursive on you: like "we can only be sure of things we can empirically verify". But we can't empirically verify that statement, because it's a statement of epistemology. (This is one of the fundamental flaws of logical positivism, though not the one that killed it.)

Or the opposite: Our observations reflect actual reality.

Or that induction actually leads us to truth.

Or that our logical processes arrive at things that are actually true, not just that seem true.

That's probably enough for a start...

> we can only be sure of things we can empirically verify

That's a straw man. I never said anything about being sure. We can never be sure about anything. Type 2 conspiracy theories might be true. So could last-thursday-ism.

The reason these things can be rejected is not because there is evidence against them. Last-thursday-ism might be right. But so could last-wenesday-ism or last-tuesday-ism or last-monday-ism or... Each of these is an instance of a large family of hypotheses, none of which are falsifiable. Only one of them can possibly be right, so even if one of them is right the odds that you've picked the right one are indistinguishable from zero. That is why all unfalsifiable hypotheses can be rejected.

I never said that you said that.

I never said you said that I said it.

See, I can play that game too.

I was not attempting to play games. But since you seem to be, I'm out.