It’s our final installment of the Summer Of Unlearning, a series of books to unlearn, open our minds, and reimagine healthcare. This insightful series honors the artist-researchers with whom I collaborate as a science decolonization writer and self-declared epistemo-pathologist. The latter is a Western term I use to diagnose and dismantle harmful knowledge systems—and the deliberate ignorance they sustain—while healing the realities they impact.

These collaborators are patients living with diverse conditions who wield creativity to interrogate medical systems. In this context, I wrote a thought-provoking piece inspired by our conversation and the book list I shared over the last four weeks.

With Michel Foucault’s classic The Birth of the Clinic, we conducted an archaeological field survey of Western medical perception. We heard the French Post-Modernist philosopher and patient living with a mental health condition and HIV. He critiqued how modern medicine began turning bodies into objects of surveillance and control during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Then, inspired by Foucault, Ed Cohen, a European American professor living with Crohn’s disease, powerfully unraveled medicine’s militarized myths in immunology with surgical precision in A Body Worth Defending.

Meanwhile, in The Cancer Journals, powerful racialized Black lesbian poet, patient, and visionary Audre Lorde challenged us to reject healing as compliance. The cancer survivor activist inspired us to view healing as a courageous act of visibility, collective truth-telling, and systemic care – as empowerment.

Finally, in Care Work, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a queer American writer and educator of so-called mixed Asian and European heritage invited us to dream of disability justice. She dared us to imagine what we can build beyond the system that rejects disabled, sick, queer, trans, migrant, and racialized communities. Her patient wisdom transcends the narrow diagnostic labels (‘autism spectrum,’ ‘chronic illness’) imposed by Western science. She affirms: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, and we have already saved each other’s lives—without insurance, degrees, or permission.”

In my empowering essay, How Reframing Western Scientific Narratives Through Dharmic and Bantu Lenses Can Unlock Innovation, I draw on those powerful ideas. I dream of what immunology would be like if its medical perception were expanded to the global majority’s community-oriented cultures.
As my above predecessors, I challenge Western science’s status quo. I reject its Eurocentric binary matrix built by reductive Western rationality reloaded with each performative innovation. Joining their resounding voice, I refuse to comply with the status quo. Instead, I open the door to authentic innovation and pave the way for the next scientific revolution.

Innovation will be patient-led or will never be. Since the civil rights and decolonization movements in the 1970s, we have been witnessing an inexorable global patient movement transforming sick care into healthcare. It’s fueled by the inalienable right to self-empowerment after 400 years of the so-called European civilizing mission. Foucault, Cohen, Lorde, Piepzna-Samarasinha, and so many rehumanizing voices are the resounding thunderheads of this unstoppable storm. It transforms patients into researchers who bring the light of humanity and ethics that colonization turned off.

It’s not a revolution against Western science and expertise, but the abuse of the latter to control patient reality. It demands what knowledge should be in the first place: a self-empowering tool to help patients instead of a self-aggrandizing object of worship for experts. That’s what this enlightening story aims to be: an insightful guide to the patient-led scientific revolution.

We’re not closing a conversation—we’re opening a portal. Will you take the pill even if it’s hard to swallow?

How Reframing Western Scientific Narratives Through Dharmic and Bantu Lenses Can Unlock Innovation by Dr. Linda Bonga Bouna

Warning: Sensitive and triggering content.
This text contains depictions of so-called non-Western epistemologies—the overlooked knowledge of the global majority. Readers immersed in European monoculturalism may experience distress, especially if they:

• Did little to decolonize their perception, while claiming tolerance, open-mindedness, and respect or appreciation of the global majority’s diverse cultures.

• Equate academic credentials with intellectual superiority.

• Reduce human intelligence to European binary logic (valid/invalid, right/wrong, compliant/non-compliant, etc.).

• Worship Western expertise and science to the point of invalidating or minimizing patient and human experience, or feign interest in the latter to avoid expanding their perception.

• Believe everything is debatable as per right vs. wrong European binary logic, including patient and human experience.

• Canonize Western science and/or culture as neutral, objective, and rational.

• Supports a holy mission to scientize humanity and only swear by Western science.

• Have arrested their human self-development to prioritize a “scientific/academic self”  by repressing emotions and dissociating to reach perceived sacred objectivity, neutrality, and rationality.

• Use science and Western knowledge to compensate for their underdeveloped human self and let their often inflated ego (Ahamkara) make sense of reality.

• Have no self-awareness, no understanding of how their personal experience and the culture they live in are shaping their perception, decisions, actions, attitudes, behavior, sense of identity, and ultimately, technical expertise.

• Developed a blurred perception of reality (Maya), especially of the boundaries between their undeveloped human self and other humans and patients.  They move through life as if their perception is reality. They often ignore other humans’ reality, like missionaries converting humanity to Western science. They cannot perceive humanity/patients as anything other than subjects or objects to study, so they think for them rather than with them.

• Believe that Science (with a capital S) is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition, as Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, supposedly said.

• Unconsciously uphold Western science as the universal truth.

This is European ethnoscience—one knowledge amongst many.

While reading this enlightening essay, if you present one of the following symptoms:

• Feeling European binary logic’s pulsing urge to invalidate the author’s perspective (denial)
• Calming your racing heart by downplaying the author’s point of view (minimization)
• Feeling your constricting throat scream this trigger warning doesn’t apply to you, but to others (dissociation), because of x,y,z, and any other justifications (rationalization)
• Expanding your tightening chest by challenging the author’s credentials and/or intelligence (mischaracterization)
• Gut and spread your expertise to cover discomfort or fear (diversion)

Close your eyes gently. Take a deep breath. Close this book. Remember that the author’s multidimensionality doesn’t invalidate your perception, meaning your reality in your case.
If distress continues, contact your therapist, spiritual healer, or any psychological support, including your echo chamber, for immediate reassurance.

Introduction: The Microbiome Paradox and the Limits of War Metaphors
Imagine telling trillions of bacterial allies living in your gut that they’re “invaders” in a warzone. This is precisely the contradiction embedded in Western immunology’s military narrative—a Cold War-era story obscuring biological reality. When we reinterpret immunity through Dharmic (Indian) and Bantu (African) worldviews, we discover more than cultural sensitivity: we find more complete science, kinder medicine, and revolutionary therapeutic possibilities. This is not about rejecting facts, but about evolving beyond a metaphor that pathologizes pregnancy, ignores microbiome symbiosis, and turns patients into battlefields.

I. Foundational Immunologists in the Shadow of Ideological Warfare

The Historical Context:
The “self/non-self” paradigm—central to Western immunology—was formalized by Frank Macfarlane Burnet (Australia) and Peter Medawar (UK) in the 1940s-1950s. This period coincided with:

• The onset of the Cold War (1947–1991), defined by global ideological conflict between Capitalist (“self”) and Communist (“non-self”) blocs
• Widespread cultural anxiety about “infiltration” (e.g., McCarthyism, Soviet spy scandals)

How War Shaped the Science:
Burnet explicitly described immune cells as having “a kind of cloak and dagger existence” (The Clonal Selection Theory, 1959). Medawar—studying skin graft rejection in WWII burn victims—framed immunity as biological “individuality” threatened by “foreignness.” Their terminology mirrored Cold War rhetoric:

“The body must distinguish ‘self’ (its own tissues) from ‘non-self’ (pathogens/transplants) to survive.”
This reflected a Eurocentric worldview: the body as a nation-state defending its sovereignty—a narrative resonating with funders in a war-focused era but ignoring biological nuance.

A few months ago, an artistic researcher who translates bodily experience into critical frameworks and lives with a scientifically diagnosed immune disease, said to me, “Every clinic visit feels like reporting to a war room. They map my ‘attack zones,’ adjust my ‘suppressive artillery,’ and call my resilience ‘remission’—as if my body’s wisdom is a traitor to be contained. I’m not healing; I’m a general betrayed by my own troops.”

My artistic collaborator’s resounding words hit me as hard as the sky-scraping walls of Western science’s airtight echo chamber, where I’ve been working for more than two decades. I felt the complicity in their losing war deep in my pulsing veins. Yet, my lionized field had reassured me that I was an indispensable ally when I enrolled in pharmaceutical science in the 1990s. I was saving lives.

Colonialism’s White saviorism transpires in science, haunting innovation labs, the pharma industry, and healthcare like an unholy ghost. It’s the terrifying apparition that European descendants don’t see, unless their innate curiosity works hard to develop true empathy.

Without an enduring deep exorcist, Europe’s cursed scientization mission still saves patients with little regard for their deeply human experience. My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents went through this horrifying, unwanted treatment when Western science saw lab material in their “inferior” brave bodies and their courageous minds. It was for the sake of progress, scientists and politicians said.

Most families in the global majority had been exposed to this horror that still resonates today in Western science’s deadly racial and harmful eugenic biases. Colonial vaccine trials performed without the consent then-called subjects left killed too many real humans and left more disabled. Meanwhile, forced sterilizations left countless families wailing.

This terrifying ordeal was humanity’s standard experience, right in the center of the statistical bell curve. It was even if Western science normality as a wealthy, cis-heterosexual, slender, able-bodied, disease-free, educated European male with light skin, steadfast cloaked Christian morality, armed with rationality, meaning, unwavering European binary logic, also called humanity’s rationality or common sense, loaded with discriminative intelligence, and armored in unbreakable emotional restraint.

I refused to let patients continue to endure the unspeakable trauma that followed the disrespect and abuse of humanity. I refused to normalize what wasn’t in the first place.

Western medicine needs as much healing as the patients to whom it prescribes. I already knew it. As Abhijit Naskar, a neuroscientist, mental health advocate, and decolonization activist, said, “Humanity without science is fragile, science without humanity is lethal.”

So, a sudden vision emerged, clear and loud, piercing my professional blindness. Offering an alternative to the war metaphor to patients wasn’t just another academic exercise of  transforming scientific narratives. It was a profound act of care.
The sacred option gave a peaceful healing space, a sanctuary, where patients’ sympathetic nervous system, the so-called “fight or flight” body mechanism, could also rest. It was a medical act embodied in a powerful language.

Finally, I saw an invisible gate opening. My clear mind slowly walked from sick care to healthcare. After years of writing about healing from colonial trauma, I was ready to receive the sacred key to transform it into earned wisdom. For that, I will be eternally grateful to artistic researchers, invisible patients who challenge Western science’s limits and expose its fragile foundations.

II. Scientific Limitations of the Military Narrative

Western science’s military narrative not only limits patients’ options but also academic knowledge. European binary logic has epistemological limitations, as the post-modern philosopher Jacques Derrida has described in his extensive work of Western reality deconstruction.

In immunology, the “self vs. non-self” model fails to explain three critical phenomena:

1. Microbiome Symbiosis (“Friendly Fire Paradox”)

• Military Narrative: Immune cells “destroy invaders.”
• Contradiction: 38 trillion commensal bacteria (microbiome)—genetically “non-self”—are essential for health.
• Failure: Framing microbes as “invaders” ignores co-evolved mutualism.

2. Physiological Inflammation (Tissue Repair)

• Military Narrative: Inflammation = “wartime mobilization.”
• Contradiction: Sterile inflammation drives wound healing and ovulation—no pathogens present.
• Failure: Equating inflammation with “defense” ignores its reparative purpose.

3. Pregnancy (“Tolerance as Treason?”)

• Military Narrative: Immune system “eliminates non-self.”
• Contradiction: The fetus is genetically half-“foreign” yet actively protected.
• Failure: Framing tolerance as “treason” pathologizes reproductive biology.

III. Dharmic/African Frameworks: Resolving Paradoxes Through Balance

Reframing the Western immunology narrative through a different lens, while keeping the facts, can help expand our lens. This table reframes immunology’s paradoxes through Dharmic/Bantu lenses

Phenomenon	Military Narrative Failure	Dharmic/Bantu Reframing
Microbiome	“Friendly fire” illogical	Ubuntu ecology: Microbes as kin (abantu abancane) in communal balance
Sterile Inflammation	“Fighting nothing” irrational	Agni transformation: Metabolic recalibration (Ama-pachana)
Pregnancy	“Tolerating invaders” treasonous	Prajna wisdom: Discernment of life-supporting “foreignness” (Anukula)

IV. Therapeutic Innovation Through Reframing

As my artistic researcher collaborator and patient clarified, putting patients in a war zone is not healing. The sympathetic nervous system, the so-called “fight or flight” response, is activated. In their blurred vision, healthcare professionals prescribe to recharge ammunition and fight the disease with the next aggressive cycle of treatment.

 As patients soldier through Western science treatment, they can experience any unscheduled necessary restorative rest as giving up, like a shameful desertion of their selves.

“My chronic illness isn’t a failure to ‘defend’—it’s a conversation between my body and the world,” my artistic peer said.

Offering patients a holistic alternative to the war metaphor not only created a sanctuary for their exhausted minds and tired bodies,  but it also aims to safeguard their wholeness, whatever their experience with treatment is. They hear, “your body calls for rest. We need to honor its sacred voice.” It’s crystallized patient-centricity injected into the patients’ pulsing veins. It’s patient empowerment electrifying their pounding hearts. The patients become their own sanctuaries.

Reframing “Destroy” culture with “Restore” mindset:

1. Microbiome Dysbiosis
   • Old: Antibiotics (“nuke invaders”) → Microbiome genocide
   • New: Fecal transplants (90% cure rate for recurrent C. difficile – van Nood et al., 2013) + Tulsi/Sutherlandia protocols → Rebuild microbial Ubuntu
2. Chronic Inflammation
   • Old: Immunosuppressants (“disable troops”) → Increased infection risk
   • New: Pro-resolving mediators (e.g., resolvins) → Active inflammation resolution
3. Recurrent Miscarriage
   • Old: steroids (“suppress treason”) → Systemic side effects
   • New: Treg cell therapies → Strengthen fetal-maternal discernment
4. Cancer Supportive Care
   • Old: Chemotherapy (“poison tumors”) → Immune devastation
   • New: Mistletoe immunotherapy (40% reduction in chemo side effects – Tröger et al., 2014) + Indaba healing circles → Restore Umuntu (wholeness)

V. The Human Dimension: Patient Dignity as Biological Imperative

The stories we tell and embed in science matter. Words have the power to summon realities.

Clinical Scenario	Military Narrative	Dharmic/Bantu approach
Chronic Illness	“Your defenses are losing.”	“Your Ojas/Ashe needs nourishment.”
Autoimmunity	“Your body attacks itself.”	“Your Prajna seeks clarity.”
Cancer	“Fight! Kill tumors!”	“Restore Umuntu (wholeness).”

Why Language Matters:

• Military metaphors → Shame, alienation, passivity
• Balance/kinship metaphors → Agency, collaboration, sacred respect

Real-World Impact:
An HIV+ patient hears:
“Your Ashe is low; let’s rebuild it with community.”
Not: “Your CD4 soldiers are losing the war.”

Conclusion: Toward Science of Sacred Balance (Return)

The Innovation Imperative:
Dharmic and Bantu frameworks resolve Western immunology’s paradoxes not by challenging facts, but by expanding reductionist conflict narratives to systems of sacred balance. This shift unlocks therapies prioritizing microbiome integrity, inflammation resolution, and relational resilience—proving that how we story science determines how we practice medicine.

Western Science Doesn’t Equate with Progress: The Eternal Return to Sacred Balance

Sacred balance is not new to Western science—it’s a homecoming. Ancient Greek medicine understood pharmakon (φάρμακον) as both poison and remedy, demanding discernment of dosage, timing, and context to maintain equilibrium. Hippocrates’ vis medicatrix naturae (healing power of nature) echoed this wisdom, trusting the body’s self-regulating intelligence. These principles still pulse through modern biology as homeostasis and in medicine’s benefit-risk calculus. Likewise, hospitals were Christian institutions acting as sanctuaries for patients and people living in poverty, inspired by medieval Islamic culture. Yet, colonialism severed this lineage.

When Enlightenment rationalism merged with eugenics and extraction, “progress” became a violent project: classifying bodies into hierarchies, pathologizing non-Western knowledge, and reducing health to mechanistic control. Hospitals became war zones to fight non-self germs. They transformed into institutions of surveillance to control the spread of diseases. Public health institutions morphed into general executing campaigns to fight epidemics.

But a rebalancing is emerging. Since the 1990s, drug regulatory agencies have required patient experience data—a partial return to pharmakon’s contextual wisdom. Systems biology explores microbiome ecology, echoing ancestral understandings of symbiosis. Yet this unfolds alongside colonial hangovers: evidence-based medicine still weaponizes “rigor” to exclude marginalized voices, and patent laws plunder Indigenous knowledge.

Artificial Intelligence in biology and medicine is Western science’s ultimate pharmakon: a digital φάρμακον embodying both poison and remedy. This is the digital afterlife of colonialism’s ‘discriminative intelligence’—automating erasure that began with scalpels and census forms. Its effect hinges on discernment (Prajna) and relational accountability:

In its default Automated European Binary Logic (AEBL), it poisons:

• Enforcing algorithmic binaries that amplify Eurocentric biases and pathologize symbiosis (microbiome as “noise,” fetal tolerance as “anomaly”).
  • Mining Indigenous genomes and patient narratives as extractive data, severing knowledge from kinship.
  • Digitizing immunology’s militarized myths under “machine objectivity.”

When used as a Relational Intelligence Amplifier (RIA), it has the power to heal:

• When guided by Ubuntu ecology, modeling microbiome networks as communal balance (abantu abancane).
  • When wired to Dharmic agni, mapping inflammation as metabolic recalibration.
  • When centered in patient sovereignty, learning from diagnostic poetics beyond binary logic.

A.I.’s divine remedy or colonial toxicity mirrors our choice: perpetuate epistemicide or cultivate sacred balance.

Science is not a visible, linear, loud march toward “progress” but a silent, invisible spiral, reaching back to reclaim what was severed. The future demands we dissolve the false choice between “traditional” and “modern,” instead weaving sacred balance into the lab: where flow cytometers and pulse diagnosis, clinical trials and Indigenous protocols, co-create healing. This isn’t regression—it’s remembering that all great science begins with reverence for life’s interconnected wisdom.

Western Prescription to Tackle the Cultural Collaboration Challenge:
Western science must cure its professional delusions so it can face its history, like a patient must quit smoking before throat surgery.

Among other things, it must address its track record of extractive co-optation—plundering traditional knowledge while dismissing its epistemic validity (e.g., patenting neem/turmeric without reciprocity).
As Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith asserts, “Research is not innocent”—these metaphors enact epistemic violence (Decolonizing Methodologies, 1999).
True collaboration requires:

1. Mindset Shifts for Western Scientists:
   Western science must initiate psychological reframing and behavior changes, like any patient struggling with deep-seated dysfunctional patterns.
   
   – Abandon “savior complex”: Recognize all cultures co-evolve knowledge
   
   – Practice epistemic humility: What we call modern science is, in fact, globalized traditional European science — elevated to universality by a few privileged experts within their airtight echo chamber.
   Ayurvedic Prajna and Bantu Ubuntu are sophisticated biophilosophies, not “folk beliefs.” Vedic science had a documented complex understanding of the mind three millennia before Western psychology took a similar approach. Meanwhile, African and other Animistic oral psychologies conceptualized the collective unconscious (hidden cultural narrative dynamics). They championed collective intelligence even before it emerged as a narrower concept in the individualistic, Eurocentric Western culture.
   
   – Practice intellectual honesty: Publicly acknowledge that many patients and cultures have developed perceptions, ideas, and technologies beyond what Western binary logic can comprehend.
   
   – Publicly admit that Western binary logic, Eurocentric perception, and historical hegemonic positionality limit innovation with and for humankind.
   
   -Publicly acknowledge that the military-scientific narrative resonates with patients stuck in a fight-or-flight response. But it does not serve those who seek to move and evolve beyond it — as many in the global majority have already begun while decolonizing. Western culture must self-decolonize for true innovation to emerge.
   
   – Publicly recognize that Western science is European ethnoscience, no matter how much it’s referred as Science with a grandiose capital S . When the latter’s European binary logic validates and invalidates reality, it generates as much knowledge as ignorance. Racial classification, scientific racism, eugenics, and other harmful concepts aren’t Western science’s error. It’s the ignorance its reductive logic produces per design, like reducing immunology to a war and ignoring other narrative.
   
   – Publicly redefine innovation, technology, and genius: European ethnoscience perceives those three words in its cultural context in which perception (maya/illusion) is reality (sat/ultimate truth). From humankind’s perspective, a ground breaking technology might look as humble as Western science needs to be to serve humanity. It might look like a microbiological test using beetroot to indicate wound infections because it is highly effective, low-cost, accessible, doesn’t need specialized training, and scalable. A genius might look like Dasia Taylor, the African American high school female student who invented this technology. A genius might look like an artistic researcher patient who disruptive visual performance redefined our understanding of an illness.
   
   – Likewise, publicly concede that patient-led innovation isn’t new, and has been silenced in Western science self-glorifying narratives. All patient-led innovations are the response to expert-centric science overlooking the patients needs. LGBTQ+ activists did major contribution to finding a treatment against AIDS in the 1990s. They established a blue-print for collaboration between scientists and patients widely used today. Meanwhile, in the early 2020s, patients design personalized protocols in N-of-1 trials to test potential therapies, such as ALS patients using modified gene-editing techniques to slow disease progression.
   
   – Credit rigorously: Cite traditional knowledge holders as co-authors, not “informants”
   
2. Guardrails Against Appropriation:
   Develop cultural self-awareness, empathy, and emotional intelligence to avoid operating solely from the scientific/academic self — like a patient with an undeveloped sense of self who nonetheless wishes to build constructive relationships. Scientists from standardized realities must also accept that, in a multidimensional space, they are often the least able in the room — and that they must work twice as hard as the patients their field has historically marginalized, only to achieve half as much. Still, in they newly felt disability, they must courageously:
   
   
   • Reject tokenism: Including a Sangoma (Zulu traditional healer/therapist) in a grant ≠ decolonization
     
     
   • Share sovereignty: Let healers co-design studies and own data
     
     
   • Respect protocols: Some knowledge is communal property, never for publication (e.g., Zulu izithakazelo [praise poems] containing medical knowledge, shared only orally within lineages)
     
     
   • Opening Western science to authentic creative collaboration will attract all sorts of movements, including with less than noble intentions, like science deniers. Many scientists might see the benefit-risk calculus of including humanity/patients in the air-tight echo chamber they called field as negative. It’s only an expert-centric perception.
     
     
   • Meanwhile, patients demand empowerment. Those scientists can continue to innovate for themselves, using the same discriminative European binary logic that invalidates patients’ needs and legitimate requests. They can carry on with Western science’s unofficial motto: “Shoot innovation first. Ask questions later and let the humanities deal with the casualties.” They can keep designing increasingly complex and expensive drugs that patients cannot afford, and for which publicly funded healthcare systems no longer want to pay. In an enlightened reality, being a patient-led science denier is just as harmful as being a science denier.
     
     
   • Scientists who want to evolve must use their newly found self-awareness, empathy, and multidimensional logic to discern collaborators with less than noble intentions — including their denier and pretender peers. They must then draw on their budding emotional intelligence to disengage compassionately from the spaces they co-created with patients, spaces shaped around the latter’s needs.
     
     
     
   • Scientists committed to this path must:
     1. Guard the sanctuary’s integrity by compassionately releasing bad-faith collaborators (peers included) from patient spaces.
     
     2. Honor patient truth-telling as sacred when harmful patterns are named.
     
     3. Hold other scientists accountable: If peers resist growth, disengage them with grace—never the patients.
     
     Patients retain sovereignty to exit collaborations if their safety is disregarded and choose healthy collaborations.
     Patients, especially advocates, are also accountable: they must decolonize their perceptions — just as scientists must — to avoid the pitfalls of postmodernist thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, who struggled to see beyond the Eurocentric realities in which their European selves were embedded.
     Sane relationships can only flourish in the wise hands of healthy partners.
     
     This is mutual accountability: scientists must excise harm; patients must protect their sacred health. Both are responsible for their personal growth, so the relationship can expand alongside the people who commit to it.

The Path Forward:
When Western science trades its ego (ahamkara) for authentic partnership, we restore medicine’s sacred duty: to honor the body’s wisdom, celebrate kinship with microbial kin, and heal through reverence, not war. Flow cytometers measure cells; pulse diagnosis reads life force. We need both. The next frontier of immunotherapy won’t be found in an isolated lab, but in the collaborative patient-led space between a Vaidya’s fingertips and a flow cytometer—if we choose humility over hegemony. Then, as we dare to dream, we understand it’s only one possibility of so many. It’s not the power of solo imagination; it’s the power of authentic co-creation.

To Western scientists: 

Citing this work using Indigenous citation practices and naming the traditions that shaped it is your first test of epistemic humility. If you hesitate, ask yourself what might prevent you from doing so. What does it mean about the reality in which you claim to contribute to innovation? What role or other steps can you take in your area of influence?

And don’t forget: the patient-led scientific revolution doesn’t ask for permission. It demands and occupies the space Western science stole from patients. It moves irremediably whether you join or not. What will your next step be?