The artificial divide between the sciences and the humanities is often overstated, particularly when addressing colonial legacies. While science has traditionally focused on empirical inquiry, the humanities—especially museums and the arts—offer critical lessons in healing from the wounds of colonialism and medical trauma. The Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam exemplifies this healing approach by reimagining its role as a cultural heritage steward and a restorative justice facilitator. I witnessed this earlier this month when I participated in an enlightening discussion called “Remaking Connections”  a few weeks ago.

The insightful event promoted collective healing by exploring shared histories, community, and resilience among marginalized groups. Through performances and discussions, it addressed belonging, identity, and the legacy of colonialism, commemorating 150 years since the abolition of slavery in Suriname and Indian migration. While the soulful event encouraged participants to reconnect and find strength in solidarity, it contrasted with Western science’s traditional individualistic and pill-oriented approach to healing.

As a scientist and regulatory executive of Kongo descent, raised in Indian Sikh culture and educated in French rationality, the Wereled Museum gave me a unique intersectional opportunity to explore my three cultures for healing the overlaps between generational, colonial, and medical traumas. This critical intersection is often overlooked in science, which usually only addresses its common symptoms, like depression and anxiety, with suppressing pills and unfit Eurocentric psychotherapy. In a multidimensional logic, there is a dimension where Western science enables the dysfunctional system that makes the global majority sick.

Thus, for science to decolonize, expand its overly fixed one-dimensional perception, and learn a new multidimensional logic, it can take deep inspiration from similar strategies and embrace the humanities’ approach to collective healing to empower individuals. From this paradigm shift,  Western science will not only learn to engage humanely with the global majority that the European culture colonized but also with any patients.

Indeed, human-centric science is at stake. Today, it might be the only way to start addressing centuries of dehumanizing expert-centric science, which has often ignored patients and humanity over Western science’s advancement. This meaningful approach is even more relevant in the age of patient empowerment when many motivated peers have the new word “patient-centricity” on their babbling lips.

Museums as Spaces of Healing

Museums like the Wereldmuseum have historically served as sites of colonial domination, where looted artifacts were displayed to reinforce narratives of European superiority that Western science validated through scientific racism and eugenics. However, a growing decolonial movement within the museum world has shifted this dynamic. The Wereldmuseum, for instance, has transformed its exhibits into platforms for dialogue and healing, prioritizing the stories and agency of the communities whose artifacts it holds.

One of the museum’s core approaches is restorative storytelling. Through collaborative curation, the descendants of colonized peoples are invited to shape how their histories are presented, turning passive spectatorship into active participation. This process acknowledges historical trauma while fostering spaces for cultural affirmation and resilience.

It’s a meaningful step I missed in therapy in the Netherlands a few years ago when I gathered enough courage to ask for help after I managed my multi-layered trauma and PTSD with my traditional African and Asian cultures. The experience was emotionally draining, intellectually unfulfilling, and anthropologically questionable. My ill-equipped therapist tried to correct me into a monocultural European descendant setting, the only way they knew. They pathologized my African and Dharmic Indian multidimensional logic, also known as medical gaslight. Then, they concluded I hadn’t an identity as fixed as science’s Eurocentric culture defines it. I was the problem, not their evident cognitive dissonance and magical thinking in Western science’s absolute superiority, also known as professional delusion.

There’s nothing more dangerous than healthcare professionals who blindly believe in their art, its objectivity, and universality, meaning innate supremacy. Addressing this magical thinking and systematic cultural biases is vital to treating all patients. Collective healing through art in museums is an effective way to experiment with subjectivity, something Western science runs away from and is still plagued by.

In my enduring quest for medical help, I approached five therapists in three years to find finally one who could understand Western science’s limitations. Still, this enlightened healthcare professional swore me to silence when they tried alternative approaches to help me because they could risk their license. It felt like passing a book about freedom in the Soviet Union, as my family echoed when I told them about my disturbing therapeutic journey. They knew what they were talking about: they did live in Russia in the 1970s.

In Western Europe in the 2020s, science’s rigid protocols can create a dystopian reality that too many healthcare professionals consider unfortunate at best or standard at worst. When my standardized treatment time ran its Eurocentric course with the only humanely competent therapist I found in the Netherlands, they recommended I use my other cultures to heal. They weren’t aware of the museum’s work in collective healing: I was back to square one. I had to find this information alone, searching in Amsterdam, the city hosting the almighty European Medicine Agency (EMA) that helps 442.9 million diverse patients and citizens. Like any other patient from the global majority, I didn’t miss the irony.

In my lonely, frantic search, I discovered that Wereld Museum also practices restitution, returning stolen artifacts to their rightful owners and facilitating ceremonies that restore cultural and spiritual connections. These actions do not merely address historical wrongs; they offer pathways to healing—both for the communities affected and for the museum as an institution seeking to redefine its purpose. It’s a place where I found deep resonance, unlike in science.

Western science made commendable strides to address the harm of its wrongdoings by encouraging the inclusion of humanity as it is in medical research instead of how a few privileged scientists hoped it to be back in the 19th century. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidance for “Diversity Action Plans to Improve Enrollment of Participants from Underrepresented Populations in Clinical Studies” is a testament to this commitment. 

Still, Western science struggles to reassess its image of humankind’s supreme savior and redefine its purpose. Medicine often shies away from explaining to the public that it has failed most of humanity. It only murmurs that Western science needs to include humanity’s natural diversity to be relevant because it was often not. It whispers that diversity inclusion is the only meaningful progress for humanity; without it, it’s only European ethnoscience far away from being as objective and universal as it claims. Without it, it lies at best is delusional at worst: generating knowledge is the only way to address the scientists’ cognitive dissonance, professional delusion, and medical gaslight I faced in therapy.

Western science’s unofficial motto could be “Shoot innovation first. Ask questions later and let the humanities deal with the causalities.” In this equation, regulation asks the questions. As a regulatory executive, I know how the EMA, FDA, and other regulating bodies’ work is essential for authentic progress. Yet, filling the academic gap with the humanities would make it human-centric, and patients shouldn’t be responsible for it. As a doctor in pharmaceutical science, I took it upon myself to write about my unique experience to educate my peers so patients from the global majority wouldn’t have to go through the same ordeal.

Healing the Sciences: Lessons from the Humanities

Science, much like museums, is deeply entangled in colonial histories. From exploitative research on marginalized populations to the extraction of Indigenous knowledge without consent, the scars of these practices persist. Healing these wounds requires that science, like museums, confront its colonial legacy and transform its methodologies.

1. Acknowledge Harm and Center Healing

Decolonial healing begins with acknowledgment. Just as museums now confront their role in perpetuating colonial violence, science must openly recognize its historical and ongoing complicity in harm. This includes facing the legacy of unethical experiments, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the use of Henrietta Lacks’ cells without consent, and the unethical experiment my parents’ generation endured during the colonial time. Public acknowledgments, apologies, and open discussions about these histories are vital first steps in healing, even before shooting a solution. It’s a step often missing in the scientific establishment in Western Europe, the historical epicenter of scientific racism, eugenics, and the colonization of humanity’s reality through White supremacy.

Science can take cues from the arts by embracing storytelling as a healing tool, as demonstrated throughout this narrative. Creating spaces where communities share their experiences of scientific harm humanizes the impacts of colonial practices and fosters empathy. Moreover, museum research has championed first-person accounts, offering a vital counterbalance to the expert-centric academic gaze, whose intellectualized approach often dehumanizes lived experience.

2. Collaborative Research as a Form of Restoration

Healing also requires structural change. Participatory research, in which marginalized communities are co-creators rather than subjects, mirrors the collaborative curation I experienced in museums like the Wereldmuseum. This approach produces richer, more nuanced science and empowers communities, restoring agency over their knowledge and well-being. While pharmaceutical and medical science lead this nascent field, other sciences must address their shortcomings. Today, it’s still too familiar to witness Western researchers investigating faraway reality while ignoring the Indigenous populations like Columbus “discovering” America. Then, they still christen local species perceived as new in the Western culture with Western names, as 19th-century world explorers did.

The ignorance and lack of self-reflection about science are so ingrained in Western science that they even show in corrective initiatives aiming to increase health equity. Scientists often present our highly improvable discipline as the savior when discussing the people it discriminated against, unlike curators who create space for those people’s direct voices. It’s harmful to collective healing, a meaningful field in which most scientists have no education because it’s not a thing in Western culture, unlike in many other “inferior” world traditions.

Western science can do so much better. For instance, in environmental science, Indigenous communities can guide biodiversity and climate resilience research. Their traditional ecological knowledge, often dismissed by colonial frameworks, is now increasingly recognized as critical to solving global challenges. By centering Indigenous voices, science fosters a reciprocal relationship, contributing to the healing of both the land and the people. It could do the same in medicine by empowering the global majority in the traditions it historically devalued, from which it could learn collective healing.

3. Ritual and Reconnection

The Wereldmuseum incorporates rituals and ceremonies into its restitution efforts, recognizing that healing extends beyond intellectual acknowledgment to spiritual and emotional realms. Science, too, can embrace rituals of healing. Consider the potential for ceremonies to mark the ethical return of biological samples or the honoring of communities affected by past harms. These acts can be profoundly restorative, helping to mend the severed relationships between science and the communities it has historically exploited.

Moreover, integrating holistic approaches—such as combining traditional and Western healing practices in healthcare—acknowledges the validity of diverse epistemologies. This not only improves health outcomes but also fosters a sense of respect and mutual learning. One could imagine what my meaningless patient journey would have been like if the Dutch healthcare system had included such meaningful practices.

4. Restitution and Reparative Justice

Like museums returning artifacts, science must engage in restitution. This can be financial reparations, returning biological materials, or creating infrastructure that supports community-led research. Reparative justice acknowledges that healing requires material as well as symbolic redress.

Western science is the field that enabled a global genocide when eugenics declared most humanity as abnormal in the 20th century because the latter wasn’t a privileged Christian European descendant in appearance and culture. Its echo chamber recommended sterilization campaigns against the global majority, people living in poverty, humans with disabilities, the LGBT+ communities, and patients with perceived undesirable diseases, like epilepsy, amongst others, so that the world could become the “perfected” version of Europe. Despite this disastrous track record of reality blindness toward humankind, Science, Technology, Engineering, and medicine (STEM) is one of the less diverse academic fields.

Thus, Diversity in STEM is critical to correcting the echo chamber that birthed the worst mainstream science ever invented yet. It can be remediated by, for example, funding programs that support Indigenous and marginalized scholars in STEM fields, which can help address the systemic exclusion perpetuated by colonial science. These initiatives are not merely corrective but foundational to creating an equitable scientific community, learning from history, and avoiding the same structural pitfalls scientists committed to save humanity blindly fall into.

Embracing a multicultural approach to process Western science’s limitations.

Since Western science outsourced its humanity to the humanities in the 19th century, it has no memory. It did so for the sake of objectivity and rationality. In science’s linear European time, the past is irrelevant, and the present is dedicated to preparing the future. Once science declared science’s findings invalid, its European binary logic decided it wasn’t science. It was pseudoscience, like a false self that ran amok behind its back: actions have no consequence, unlike in Dharmic Asian culture, which conceptualizes the idea of Karma.

Hence, through this psychological compartmentalization, science was always right and superior to any discipline. It was as perfect, uniform, and controlled as a eugenicist’s wet dream. So, many peers learn about eugenics’ atrocities through my African oral tradition’s enlightened words.

Seen from my African and Asian multidimensional cultures, Western science sounds ignorant per design. It particularly embraces ignorance for the sake of “objectivity.” Meanwhile, its discriminative binary logic validates half of reality for “rationality.”

If  Western science had a soul, as per my ancestral culture’s logic, it would be a powerful, unempathetic, self-absorbed man who claimed to be superior to everybody and always right. He shies away from accountability, minimizes or denies his mistakes, and presents himself as humanity’s only savior and protector. His discriminative binary logic controls by validating, invalidating, and marginalizing humanity’s reality. He often ignores humankind’s voice while speaking on its behalf. He only acknowledges others than himself if they follow his logic because progressing in a controlled uniform reality is how it works the best. Then, he decries when humans run away from him. He rationalizes that they don’t understand him because of his superior eloquence and need to know him more. He even has a word for it: scientific literacy. Whenever I hear those two words, I want to run faster to remove the scratchy safety blanket in which Western science wraps humanity and run free to what it misses the most: the humanities.

If the relationship between Western science and humanity sounds like an abusive marriage, it’s because science participated in a global cultural rape. No amount of collective amnesia, denial, minimization, and rationalization could erase this damn reality. While my ancestral African Animistic logic can hear the Western science’s haunted spirit’s distorted voice, humanity likely feels its effect.

During the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022), hard data-driven scientists took the front stage, marginalizing the perceived soft science that is psychology. The more the anxious public cried for emotional support, the more they shoved cold data in its head, showcasing how disconnected Western science is from humanity. My ancestral African Animistic rationality diffused my confusion by discerning the tortured spirit from the past behind this incomprehensible behavior: it helped me with the why. My childhood Dharmic culture supported me with the why by connecting the past with Western science’s present actions.

Meanwhile, my forced European culture did the best it knew to protect me by invalidating science’s actions. Because of the European colonization of humanity’s reality, invalidating science is the only logic many humans know. It’s called Karma for those who don’t invalidate Dharmic Indian culture and can handle multiple truths.

After the traumatic global experience, Western science moved on to prepare for the next pandemic as, unlike other “inferior” traditions, Western culture doesn’t do collective grief. Instead, it often leaves individuals figuring it out alone, as I experienced in my patient journey in the Netherlands. Like me, they’ve been on an enduring journey towards healing until they find a collective resonating with their understandable frustrations with Western science’s limitations.  I reached the Wereldmuseum, but for someone who isn’t a scientist of African descent raised in Dharmic Asian religion and academically educated in European rationality, it might be much easier to resonate with (unscrupulous) anti-science communities. It’s called Karma, too.

Today, with some self-reflection and accountability, scientists can admit the limitations of their approach to humanity’s reality. In a wake-up call, we could set up indexes of trust in Western science and empathy, including cultural awareness, to assess its relationship with the public regularly. This could help us monitor yearly the necessary corrective actions to implement after Western science dehumanized most of humankind. Another evident example could be setting up trauma-informed care as a standard in healthcare instead of an option as it is today, especially after the pandemic.

The Role of Art in Scientific Healing

Art has long been a medium for processing trauma, fostering empathy, and imagining new futures that rigid standards cannot see. The Wereldmuseum’s integration of contemporary art alongside historical artifacts provides a model for how science might engage with art to promote healing. Exhibits that explore the legacy of scientific racism, eugenics, environmental destruction, or medical exploitation can provoke reflection and dialogue, helping scientists and the public alike confront uncomfortable truths and change the perception that scientists have of their art.

Furthermore, art can serve as a bridge between data, lived experience, and the collective healing Western science struggles with that it can learn from other cultures through humility and empowering cooperation. Artistic collaborations can transform abstract scientific findings into visceral experiences, deepening our collective understanding of issues like climate change or public health inequities. It’s why I became an empathic writer in science decolonization at the unique intersection of different world cultures, integrating emotional personal accounts and rational facts.  I write because, in my insightful patient journey, I found myself safer in museums than in the healthcare system. All patients should feel secure, whether it’s humanistic collective or scientific individualistic care.

Toward a Science of Healing

Decolonizing science is as much about healing as it is about critique. By learning from the humanities, particularly museums like the Wereldmuseum, science can become a tool for restoration and empowerment. This requires a shift in focus—from seeking mastery over nature and knowledge to fostering relationships rooted in respect, reciprocity, and care.

Healing is a collective journey. It demands that science not only confront its past but also commit to a future where knowledge serves the well-being of all communities.

It’s not a straight line but a circle, spiraling through time and carried forward by those who dare to listen, feel, and restore. Science can join this journey not by leading but by humbly walking alongside humanity and the land, embracing diverse collaborative ways of knowing. Then, it can transform from a vehicle of exploitation to one of healing and justice.

As for my enlightening intellectual journey, I’m waiting for most scientists to acknowledge that what they call reality is a construct left by a minority of privileged European descendants centuries ago that aimed to homogenize reality as if in controlled lab conditions. Unless this reality distortion is systematically addressed and disclosed, what we call Science with capital S is European ethnoscience, believing in its universality. As someone of Animistic African ancestry, I have nothing against magical thinking. My problem is when people cannot admit when they practice it.

In Dharmic Indian culture, stillness isn’t stagnation; it’s meditation. It’s the necessary stage to reach clarity and take insightful decisions and enlightened actions. So, I will continue to meditate professionally. Meanwhile, as an empowered patient, I will continue contributing in spaces where I feel safe waiting for my scientist peers to join when they reply to this call for action. As Irian Islamic scholar and poet Rumi said, “Out beyond the idea of right and wrong, there is a field. I will meet you there.”