Magical thinking might sound discordant when we perceive Western science as objective and universal. So, diving into the global past and emerging in the complex present often helps us understand our current invisible logic, like a long-overdue multicultural therapy thanks to empathic science.

“Think local; act global” could have been the official motto of the European colonization of humanity’s reality, as the people who endured it perceived it. Driven by an unshakable belief in innate superiority, the then-Western culture believed in its eternal God-given right to exploit earth’s resources, including humans. Politicians, religious, scientists, academics, and other dignitaries saw colonization as a life-saving civilizing mission blessing the world with supreme European enlightenment from the 15th century until often today.

Modern evidence-based Western science had a significant role in consolidating and producing cultural narratives echoing today. It was to replace God and magical thinking in explaining reality and become humanity’s Truth bearer. Meanwhile, scientists’ mindset was to overtake the world. Experts believed emotional repression and the European binary logic of validation/invalidation were the gateways to humankind’s objectivity and rationality.

In colonial times, rational, objective scientists perceived European colonization as the global medicine that would develop humankind with a dose of science that classified me as Black African, amongst other world-shaping inventions. It defined my colleague as White European, my brother-in-law as yellow East Asian, my friend as red American, and my neighbors as brown South Asians and Pacific islanders.

Western academics’ magical thinking believed humanity revolved around Europeans like they thought the sun revolved around the earth centuries before. So, they set themselves, meaning wealthy cis-heterosexual non-disabled White European males, as the desirable norm for our improvable humanity to achieve perfection. This exclusive humankind’s ultra-minority believed it spoke on everybody’s behalf while crafting today’s scientific and cultural narratives alone. Hence, medical science thought medicines developed by those narcissistic standards magically applied to all humanity without needing evidence other than using colonized people as pre-clinical materials before safer testing on “real” humans.

My elderly father’s patient perspective in the French colonized Congo in the fifties still echoes in my saddened ears. He said, “We did not know what the physicians and officials gave us. They did not tell and often lied. We lost so many family members and friends to the Europeans’ science’s glory.” While performing unconsented medical research, the doctors often left populations sicker and walked away without legal repercussions. His trembling voice added, “It was a lottery to guess if a treatment would cure or kill us. We ran away whenever the French officials came with so-called medicines. Then, the administration made medical treatments mandatory to get us.” In an unholy alliance, the colonial government made vaccination, Christening, and a Europeanized name a requirement for schooling. (Extract from the Reappearance, my historical multicultural memoir manuscript.)

So, before today’s conventional expert-centric perception argues that the European colonization of humanity’s reality’s benefits balanced its risks, I beg to listen to the patient’s experience.

In 2023, I encountered science’s magical thinking in a hospital in the Netherlands, where I underwent a long-overdue surgery for uterine fibroids, benign tumors causing excruciating pain and uncontrollable bleeding. Before the intervention, I received the lab results to determine my kidney function (eGRF) to check if the surgery would be safe. Surprisingly, the lab checked my eGRF using the African American population as a reference. I, a French-born who’s lived in Europe my entire life, had transformed into a US citizen. Perhaps I overslept and missed my Oath of Allegiance ceremony at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services: ignorance is bliss.

Experienced regulatory experts in global drug development, as I am, know African Americans in the USA and African Europeans in Europe have different diets, lifestyles, and pre-existing conditions impacting metabolism. Extrapolating the scientific data from one region to another requires further investigation, as the International Conference on Harmonization E5 on Ethnic Factors in the Acceptability of Foreign Clinical Data has recommended since 1998.

Besides, I’m a seasoned pharma regulatory scientist with one of my three cultures rooted in the Black and African diaspora. So, thanks to the relentless leadership of African American scientists and their concerned European American peers, I’ve known for years that the difference between African descendants and European descendants in kidney function is a misperception and misinterpretation by uncritical, non-inclusive uniform teams. In 2021, a commendable, inclusive, diverse American joint task force, including the American Society of Nephrology and the National Kidney Foundation, revised the US formal eGFR reporting guidelines to exclude racial biases. Then, they altered all American hospitals where I wasn’t a patient. In my pharma work, regulatory intelligence means monitoring and reflecting the evolving standards in our business. It helps to ensure patient safety. Thus, I could have died of regulatory stupidity in that Dutch hospital, and the physicians would have likely misdiagnosed it as an unfortunate acute kidney failure. Meanwhile, the uniform medical safety commission responsible for reviewing the intervention quality would have likely confirmed their misdiagnosis: welcome to the Twilight Zone.

When we live in a reality that still thinks local and acts global, knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean power, even less progress. Uterine fibroids impact women of African descent three times more than European descendant women, the favored medical standard. In Denmark, the physician I sought care from didn’t believe me when I shared this global fact, as if I didn’t belong to the medical field. In England, the doctor panicked because of the complex expression of my medical condition, which was frequent for people in my ethnic group, and didn’t believe me either. When I told my Dutch gynecologist about their hospital’s outdated American standards, they replied it wasn’t their expertise nor their department’s responsibility. They couldn’t do anything, but I could share my minor concern with the lab, fifteen silos away in the basement labyrinth.

Speaking up is the basis for continuous improvement and a quality culture, as I lived up to in my job. It makes Western science reliable, as much as fact-based data and critical thinking do. Otherwise, it’s only magical thinking, like the treatment I received.

So, I’m hypervigilant to survive the invisible echo of a forgotten dehumanizing past when Western science consolidated cultural biases against most humanity. I often brace myself for substandard care and invalidation because sometimes, the state-of-the-art fits most patients, not the most affected. I expect misdiagnosis, medical errors, botched surgeries, and unnecessary interventions because I witnessed it often. I stay woke, as the US enslaved African descendants defined in 1931 after folk and blues singer Lead Belly’s protest sang about the Scottsboro Black Boys’ brutal, inequitable trial by a biased all-White jury. He called for conscious adaptive hypervigilance, as I define it from an academic point of view. From a patient’s perspective, staying woke is exhausting. The last straw was when the Dutch hospital that mismanaged my kidney lab results asked me to participate in a clinical trial investigating fibroid treatment. “You must be kidding me,” my raging mind screamed at its sleepy vigilance and quality system unfit for humanity as my pursed lips politely declined.

When I enrolled at the pharmaceutical science university as a motivated student from a humble African immigrant background, participating in medical studies was a quick way to earn money. Yet, physicians in my college-educated family who experienced colonial times warned against it. They said, “We are still new ground for the Western scientists. We already see it in the standard of care. It might be even worse in innovative medical studies’ uncertainty. They would not know what to do if something goes wrong except to project their reality onto us because that is what they have been doing for 500 years. Many don’t want to know better, and when they decide what reality is, they do not change their minds. Stay away from clinical trials unless you are the expert.” My caring family’s words still resonates nowadays, and it does in many people that Western medical science traumatized.

“The axe forgets; the tree remembers,” the African proverb says. A trained physician aunt of mine preferred to die from an easily operable intestinal occlusion than undergo general anesthesia. She prepared her funerals in a sterile hospital bed and passed away at 52 years old. I miss her dearly. As for me, I postponed my uterine fibroid surgery for ten years to give time to Dutch healthcare professionals to hone their skills before I accepted to let them treat my “unrelatable” humanity. I felt it wasn’t enough in that hospital.

If a medicine kills 90% of patients, like the Native Americans and Australians experienced, amongst others, and traumatizes the rest, meaning most humanity, my scientific logic would assume it was unsafe in those populations. It was the harm the European civilizing mission did. It was an unconsented perceived life-saving treatment, and its long-lasting adverse effects still affect humankind. So today, there’s a long-overdue label safety update.

Scientists live in the same culture as anybody else. Twenty years ago, Western education still praised European colonization’s perceived life-saving civilizing mission, ignoring boundaries and disrespecting unrelatable and undesirable realities. Today’s Western magical thinking often closes its eyes and silences uncomfortable facts, hoping its horrifying past will disappear. Without addressing Western science’s limitations while pointing out the mistrust of the people it historically othered instead, we leave the burden of extensive systemic improvement to the patients. Substandard care toward humanity remains the norm, like autopilot behavior. Thus, I don’t blame the well-intentioned healthcare professionals I encountered in my harrowing patient experience. They worked as invisible 500-year standards expected, only not as I, today’s patient, needed. I can only pray to God to grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference because Science doesn’t seem to have replaced Her yet.

My family’s patient and professional experience taught me that we don’t help people we don’t know; we control them. We don’t save people we abuse and traumatize, nor do we repair a relationship; we manipulate them and create a trauma bond. When some European descendant peers’ fixed perception declares, “I don’t see color,” my chilling bones trust them. Hence, I re-calculated the erroneous kidney function data that the Dutch hospital gave me, and I ensured, alone, that I was prepped for surgery while leaving those healthcare professionals oversleeping in a parallel reality’s blissful echo chamber where they could believe they did a fantastic job in helping me. Then, I shared my baffling story with my inspiring regulatory scientists’ team because I was about to lead an enlightening workshop about diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging upon their request. They asked me to go deep. I performed the task as if my life depended on it because it did.

We all participate in Western medical science’s global progress: patients, healthcare professionals, researchers, economists, administrators, politicians, and anyone involved in this improvable field. My solace comes from courageous peers who are open, humble, and curious to see beyond their narrowed perceptions. As they recognize that everyone experiences reality differently, they understand that diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging aren’t about favoring people whom Western culture’s past standards dehumanized, meaning most humanity. It’s about becoming woke as those committed peers often define when they refuse the short-sighted, egocentric vision an exclusive ultra-minority imposed on us when it othered humans based on skin color, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and any naturally diverse characteristic Western science’s binary logic pathologized. It’s about addressing our blind spots through critical thinking, intellectual honesty and making a more inclusive and universal science. It’s about generating authentic enlightened knowledge addressing humanity’s multifaceted reality, meaning empathic epistemology. It’s about advancing Western science, an art that traditionally shoots innovation first, asks questions later, and lets the humanities deal with the causalities. It’s about accountability and quality, meaning responsible science and contributing to a multidisciplinary, co-creative, empathetic process with humankind.

Sound and humble science can work beyond itself, including with other cultures, because expertise in Western science doesn’t mean universal expertise in humanity. Neither is someone qualified to decide humanity’s reality alone unless they live an egomaniac delusion.

Humans progress at different speeds. Therefore, I accept that when we feel overwhelmed navigating science and the world’s complexity, many of us still need the expert-centric reinsurance of emotionally stunted egos and binary logic’s illusory certainty. Those experts mightn’t want to see color because their one-size-fits-all logic perceives it as racist. It’s s what woke means to them. Meanwhile, other patients seek authentic empowerment from empathetic professionals who process multidimensional realities. There are situations when I don’t mind dealing with expert-centric treatments because ethnic differences don’t impact all conditions. Still, when they do, I need trained Western medical professionals to co-manage and survive the ghostly silent echo from a forgotten past. Unlike in the uniformizing colonial logic, one reality won’t replace another. So, awareness, transparency, and acknowledgment of limitations are critical for those two realities to co-exist and live up to the oath many of us took: “First, do no harm.”

“He who dreams for too long will become like his shadow,” the Indian proverb says. When we believe Western science has replaced God, we risk worshiping it and practicing magical thinking instead of using the critical thinking and continuous improvement that defines it. It also means opening the dangerous door for (future) patients to renounce science. As the Covid-19 crisis showed us in 2020, many Westerners increasingly distrust Western science. The latter mightn’t need more expert-centric science and emotionless facts but more humanity and compassion. Therefore, I embrace human-centric knowledge, intellectual honesty, and compassionate science as if Western science’s life depends on it, maybe because it does.

I hope my study case helped shed additional light on humanity and patient-centric journeys toward health equality. This personal essay is also available on LinkedIn, where you can comment in the immersive reader version.