When I studied pharmaceutical science in the early 2000s, my professors taught me that patients were subjects in research. It was clinical, unquestioned, and, in hindsight, disturbingly normalized. The word “subject” implied submission. It implied that knowledge, control, and authority belonged to the scientist—and that the patient was a vessel to be studied, rather than a person to be heard.

By the time I began my career in the mid-2000s, the language had changed. Patients were now “study participants.” It sounded more inclusive. But beneath the surface, not much had shifted. Participation was often symbolic. Engagement was mostly managed. The structures of decision-making stayed in the hands of those trained to speak the language of science, not the language of lived experience.

When I stepped into leadership in the late 2000s, I started to hear something different. Not from executives, not from academics—but from patients themselves. They were no longer asking to be included. They were claiming space as partners. Not passive recipients of treatment plans or token stakeholders on advisory boards, but active shapers of research, care, and truth-telling.

That shift mattered. But the institutions around them—around us—have been slow to follow.

Western science loves a narrative of progress. It will gladly rebrand itself with new terms, new titles, new guidelines. But too often, it mutates like a cancer: changing just enough to look different, while preserving the same power imbalance underneath.

Today, patient partners continue to advocate for fundamental moral obligations—fair compensation, respectful collaboration, and the restoration of dignity that was stripped away when “experts” long ago deemed them subjects, not humans. And each time I witness that fight, I feel the weight of complicity. I feel embarrassed to be a scientist.

That feeling matters, too.

Because it’s what led me to become a science decolonization writer.

I needed to find a way to stay in relationship with science without betraying my ethics or my humanity. I needed to hold space for healing, unlearning, and calling realities by their rightful, resonant, meaningful names. And I needed to tell the truth—not the kind that erases or sterilizes pain, but the kind that remembers it and listens.

We don’t need another evolution in language. We need a revolution in practice.

Paying patient partners fairly isn’t charity—it’s the bare minimum. Shifting research hierarchies isn’t a radical gesture—it’s a long-overdue reckoning. And choosing to be led by the people who were once silenced by science? That’s not only justice. That’s what integrity looks like in action.

In 2025, I write to feel proud—not of my profession, but of my commitment to keep undoing the harm it caused. I write so I can still feel proud to be human.